If you are hosting your WordPress website with us on either shared hosting, a single account server or a managed VPS server, there are 6 simple things you can do today to speed up your website and hopefully see a noticeable difference in speed and performance.

If you do not feel comfortable making the changes suggested below just open a support ticket, and our team will take care of it for you.

Check your PHP Version
While all but a couple of servers now support up to PHP 7.2 (those that do not are left on purpose for older websites), there are still some clients running their WordPress websites on PHP 5.6 (which is end-of-life in December 2018).  Change your hosting to run your website in PHP 7.2 as this is 250% faster than PHP 5.6 and 20% faster than PHP 7.0 (Source: https://visualmodo.com/why-you-should-be-using-php-7-2/)

Change your site to use PHP-FPM
PHP-FPM is a better PHP handler that works more quickly in processing PHP scripts by using a pool of workers.  PHP-FPM is faster than traditional CGI-based methods, such as SUPHP, for multi-user PHP environments. It does not overload a system’s memory with PHP from Apache processes. (Source: https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/68Docs/PHP-FPM)

Install a WordPress Caching Plugin
We’ve seen WordPress Caching plugins work well and we’ve also seen them cause a slowdown but the good news is you can uninstall the plugins as quickly as you can install them so worth a try.  We’ve seen W3 Total Cache, and Autoptimize used effectively by clients and you may want to check them out.  (Source: https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/)

Enable the PHP Extension: OPCache
OPcache can help speed up your websites by storing compiled script bytecode in shared memory, so it does not need to run each time it is accessed.  On a web server, the PHP engine reads, parses, compiles and executes a PHP script each time that it is requested by a Web client. The reading, parsing and compilation operations put additional load on the web server’s CPU and file system and thus affect the overall performance of a PHP web application. The PHP bytecode (opcode) cache is used to store the compiled script bytecode in shared memory so that it can be re-used by PHP engine for subsequent executions of the same script. (Source: http://php.net/manual/en/intro.wincache.php)

Run the GT Metrix Test and make the suggested changes
GT Metrix is a website that will run Google Page Speed and Yahoo Y Slow tests on your site and give you results with tips on what you can do to improve speed.  Note: If you do not register the default test server is in Canada so if you are in Europe factor in latency when reading page load times and don’t pay much attention to a few seconds delay. Register and log in to select a test server closest to your location. Focus on what it tells you can be tweaked on the server to speed up your website (and talk to us) or on your website (and talk to your web developer). Some examples would be ‘Leverage Browser Caching’ (we can help with that), enabling gZIP compression (we can help with that) as well as Optimizing images (your web developer can help with that).  Working through the recommendations systematically will help speed up your website.

Upgrade your Web Hosting
Shared Web Hosting, while cheap and may work well for many people, has the disadvantage that you share the server resources with many people.  If one website uses high CPU, then your website may also slow down.  For a more consistent performance, you may want to move to a Single Account Fully Managed Server.  We’re offering a 14 day free trial with free migration in (and back again if it’s not for you!). No payment up front and zero risks.  We’ll also make all the tweaks we can to improve performance on your site.  It’s £20.83 + VAT monthly when paid annually.  (Source: https://bigwetfish.hosting/single-site/)