All Things WordPress Discussions
I am creating this topic based on discussions with a couple of folks in the forum, and a recent prodding by @bikegremlin in The Cest Pit.
Let us discuss all matters Wordpress here.
As a starting topic
For WordPress Fanboys and gals
Ranking of fastest WP themes by Kinsta
https://kinsta.com/blog/fastest-wordpress-theme/
Tagging a few random folks I know have tinkered with WP
@bikegremlin @SmallWeb @Ympker
Edit:
Of course the link that I posted from Kinsta blog was written for SEO, by a hosting company that offers managed ‘premium’ WordPress...That smell test they will never pass.
Coming to the themes, I use neve, and generate press and indeed they are one of the better ones
Tagged:
Comments
How do you backup your WP site?
Me: Updraft plugin free version, backup to Dropbox daily.
Re-posting the original reply (old one can/should be deleted):
Over the years, and judging by the types of articles I get, offered as guest posts, I've come to recognize such stuff.
That seems like an OK quality article written by someone paid to write an article "for SEO".
Testing method seems even more primitive than my testing method. Why? Because while GTmetrix and the likes give you guidelines on what you could optimize, I think that for the performance comparison, some kind of load test is required.
Also, at least for Astra, GeneratePress and Ocean WP, there are many "modules" that come with the paid theme version. They load more elements onto a page and do affect performance. It is not explicitly stated, but from the testing method description, I would "guess" that they used the basic free version. They did state no menus, pictures etc. was used in test pages. This also makes the test a bit of a... miss? Like testing a Jeep on paved roads to see if it's better than a Land Rover.
Still, at least for the above mentioned three themes, I would say they are among the better written and optimized - haven't tested the others. With Astra and Ocean WP "playing" a bit better with WooCommerce, at least in their free versions (haven't tried GeneratePress paid version, authors did include "good WooCommerce integration modules" with that one).
My testing method:
https://io.bikegremlin.com/15268/website-testing-methods/
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
I can certainly confirm on the GeneratePress - the theme is great, fast, stable, and the support, even for the free version is top class. Cherry on the top of the cake is their documentation.
As for Kinsta, I would say their articles are generally among the better - even though they are, I agree, "written for SEO".
Even
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
Can vouch for GeneratePress (paid version). With LSCache, it scores 94% for PageSpeed mobile and 99% for PageSpeed desktop without any further optimization. I also use Hueman-pro and Newspaper for a bunch of other websites, and they are slow as hell.
I'm using the script linked in my signature to automatically backup WP database and webfiles to FTP.
Easy Website Backup Script: easybackup Extremely affordable FTP backup storage: 1Fichier
One-click CDN installation on your VPS: OneClickCDN
First of: Great idea, @vyas ! I'll definitely hang out here
Don't worry too much about giving Kinsta some SEO. They make great blog posts sometimes!
Aside from my providers' daily backups,
I backup my wp sites monthly using my providers' Jetbackup to upload snapshots to my Google Drive and then Backup to Koofr (since I have 1TB cloud storage on Koofr) and local. Before I'd use Updraft Plus (free), too but WP Backup plugins are eating just too much system resources (esp. for bigger websites) as compared to smth like Jetbackup (at least on shared hosting).
I also have one site setup where I backup with XCloner plugin to Webdav (Koofr).
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
That's a nice list of backup plugins also @dedipromo will check out the script.
I use All In One WP Backup, but it recently pooped on backing up my blog when I was moving to a new server.
Tried Updraft plus for the first time, was mighty impressed.
@ympker, timely reminder on Koofr... need to start using it.
On generatepress- have you guys tried generateblocks? I came across it when I was writing the series on WP Pagebuilders. It is the no brainer of no brainer page creation tools I have seen.
https://generateblocks.com
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I ultimately decided not to buy AIO WP. For one, usage on client sites requires an extra license and, for all convenience it offers, it kinda sucks you can't extract single files from the Backup (just view them with their website tool). At least not without using some Github third party tool to extract the backup.
I like Updrafts approach more, however foe some of my 5GB websites I end up with so so many "upload10, upload11, upload12.. " folders because of the media not outsourced to CDN or smth. Jetbackup is more convenient in that regard. Or FTP, even, which I could use with Updraft hehe.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
For backups I prefer server doing the job, than a plugin backing itself up practically. As @Ympker said - less load on the server from what I could tell.
JetBackup + Backblaze, along with hosting provider's backups, and monthly copy to an off-line hard disk, just in case.
For page builders, I'm sticking with Elementor. Good documentation, saves a lot of time coding, and doesn't work too slowly if you don't use too many stuff. IMO, page builders boil down to saving time (and development budget). For better performance and stability, suppose it's better making it all without any page builders.
There are loads of other page builders, both old and new, and they are all "the next best thing", but since their main use is practically saving the time (and allowing those who don't code to make websites look as clients want them to look), going with one that is familiar makes sense. Also, considering future support and the fact that by using tools others are familiar with, clients are less dependant on you (I think the independence route is an ethical one, if for no other reason, then in case something happens to me).
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
If anyone is feeling charitable I recently became aware of a local charity essentially being held to ransom to the tune of £350 per update to a wordpress site and £350 per year for hosting (it’s on a siteground reseller plan ultimately ).
Also the site runs like shit.
I am looking to help by having the theme approximately recreated or source theme identified (claimed to be bespoke, it’s probably not) so I can get them moved and hand back control.
If anyone is up for a bit of social justice PM me, they have been getting screwed like this since 2012, the company will give them no access and are unyielding.
Sort of Wordpress related
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
While not a programmer, or developer, happy to help in other ways. Incidentally I see posts like this more often than desirable in FB Wordpress groups. The ‘premium’ hosting services like Kinsta, Closte, Flywheel...charge a bomb under the guise of managed services.
Since you mentioned charity a thought nicked to mind: if they are a registered charity, they might be eligible for Google for Nonprofit credits. Yes google, but yes, financially no cost.
——
On a tangential note:
The malaise of charging nonprofits a bomb is common in Drupal world. The organization I consult with paid @ 1,000 US Dollars per domain for a ‘security patch’ last year. Only talking like 15 odd domains
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Happy to help as best as I can. Toss me a PM with details, and I'll check the site out, do a bit of due diligence and revert
Would be glad to help also, but you may have already gotten the help you need
All offers much appreciated, lots of PM's in, much appreciated, I am sorry to derail this fine topic
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
Sup my fellow people
Ha forgot we had a Les by name Wordpress:-) welcome!
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Had a quick look into the website. While the theme may seem to be a bit generic, the CSS file includes elements that lend credence to the fact that it may very well be bespoke.
FWIW, the site doesn't really have much in terms of features which would require real development. So, my recommendation for the non profit organization would be to simply buy a template of their choice from themeforest.com, and then have a few volunteers from LES recreate pages, which shouldn't take more than a week or two.
Net cost to the non profit would be about $50-$60 for the base template of their choice with guaranteed updates for the template, thereafter. While, LES volunteers who expressed interest in helping out, could divide the grunt work involved in recreating web pages, articles & news posts.
Good summary @kay45.
What makes also confirms a custom Bespoke theme.
The site is ironically hosted on google cloud, but the oversized and non optimal images kare the main reason for slowness.
But there are some other issues that @AnthonySmith and I discussed, best left outside this discussion.
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On the topic of Wordpress sites and speed of loading:
Here is a good post on optimizing image and image seo (rather long read, of course very WordPress specific)
https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/seo-images/
Edit: here is the PDF: https://img.gaatha.co/tM6dxU (no ads, no trackers, yada yada) for reference only
The Tl;Dr version
“Make sure that your visual content is relevant to the topic of the page. We suggest that you display images only where they add original value to the page. We particularly discourage pages where neither the images or the text are original content.”
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Hi everyone!
As long as you have nice reverse proxy cache before wordpress, almost every theme, except really bloated one, will give you 100:100 pagespeed rank as it should bypass wordpress' php and mysql completely.
Just my 2cents.
@Smarty Can you recommend any good caching plugins?
Different
Plugins have different levels of mojo in
Shared or self hosted
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Most are self-hosted; but some clients host themselves, what mojo you got?
Here's a good list: https://wpastra.com/best-wordpress-caching-plugins/
I use/have used Wp Total Cache, WP Rocket, Hummingbird.
Now main WP sites are on VPS+Gridpane (who offer Redis page caching/fastcgi page caching for Nginx.
I am not too familiar with the differences between the two.
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Oh shoot, I meant to specify any good plugins to use with a caching reverse proxy e.g varnish/nginx re: @Smarty's post. I couldn't find any references in that list.
Also side note, Gridpane looks great, are you on their pro plan?
WP Total Cache has worked best for me
Right now, I am not using any caching plugin though. Just HostMantis caching system.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
Some clarifications are to be made:
Any caching wordpress plug-in, works inside wordpress, so in terms of performance php was already called and your answer will be late no matter how well the plug-in is marketed.
I suggest a straight-forward obvious thing: bypass wordpress when your content are static. Even dynamic pages can be cached on an interval basis - to serve cached copy for 5 minutes.
1) wget sitemap.xmls with all urls with timestamps.
2) wget fresh posts and pages into local cache folder.
3) zopfli and brotli them to the maximum extent.
4) Tell your webserver to bypass cache for developers' ips, dynamic pages, etc and use internal redirects to cache for everyone else.
5) Repeat when new content is ready.
That way almost all your posts and pages will be served as usual prepacked static htmls within 1-2 milliseconds with a modern HTTP2 webserver.
P.M. me if you need a custom setup. It works only on vpses and dedis though, where you can configure any software as you like.
For those who would like the “old Wordpress” I.e the non Gutenburg, version 4.9x
Do give a try to ClassicPress. Been using it on a test site, is lighter and faster
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I am using the one with cheetah pic. My favourite amongst the cache plugins.
✓✓Only shared hosting-both DA and cPanel Still in 2006
Hi @vyas, love to see a detailed tutorial about Frontity. #request
UpCloud free $25 through this aff link - Akamai, DigitalOcean and Vultr alternative, multiple location, IPv6.
Someone shed some light on Ghost CMS Platform ( like this Thread ).
Too bored to use WP. If anyone guides to optimise the Ghost blog, it will be much helpful.
@vyas @AnthonySmith @seriesn @Ympker @Smarty @MikePT etc.
All I can tell you is I tested it when considering what to use for https://lowendspirit.com and decided on Grav
https://inceptionhosting.com
Please do not use the PM system here for Inception Hosting support issues.
My experience with WP caching (TL/DR LiteSpeed is way better than everything I've tried - except the paid only WP Rocket, which is close):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/7303/wordpress-caching/
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
What plugins do you guys use to sync sites between local dev and production environment? I've been looking for a solid plugin for a long time... but it seems all the free ones are lacking in one way or another.
Although not a plug-in, Softaculous offers push to live from a dev environment. Used it multiple times and worked flawlessly.
Really appreciate you writing all this out, but there was some confusion.. I thought you said you use a reverse proxy cache? So my original question was more what plugin you would use to push to the cache server.
Sorry for derailing this thread @vyas
Wp simple cache and nginx fastcgi cache.. but sometimes it did not make any difference compared only with using nginx fastcgi cache..
⭕ A simple uptime dashboard using UptimeRobot API https://upy.duo.ovh
⭕ Currently using VPS from BuyVM, GreenCloudVPS, Gullo's, Hetzner, HostHatch, InceptionHosting, LetBox, MaxKVM, MrVM, VirMach.
So the question is: How to refresh cache from the wordpress?
I tried wordpress hooks but on a different setups I have with many wordpress versions and plugins installed that was not working well. So I ended up with xml sitemap parsing approach. Sitemaps are generated with free or premium yoast seo plugin. They can be generated with other plug-ins as well. Once someone have posted something - it's url and timestamp hits the sitemap. So from time to time my parser checks what we have new and updates the cache.
webserver on the edge node checks if this post or page is present in a cache folder and serve it instantly if cache hit occur. If it's not there - the request is proxied to the current main wordpress setup, which well maybe on another vps and special pre-connected keep-alive https tunnels are used to grab the answer as fast as possible.
It looks quite likely I will be deep diving into wordpress performance optimization this week.
Any free load-testing services still? (multi location simulator, different latency clients)
Loadimpact seems to require signup now. I guess I don't mind. It used to be my quick goto
loader.io?
https://tools.keycdn.com/performance bunch of tools
Can also try Redline13. They use your own AWS account in the backend so it's free if you have some AWS credits.
WordPress and Security
This can be a whole new thread in itself!
At a minimum, do use a WP security plugin like Wordfence, free version. Atleast for test sites, for production, consider a paid plan.
Example from this morning.
I got a series of alerts from WordFence for one of our (WP) sites. Wordfence locked the user out. (login via 'admin' was disabled)
tor96.xxx.com
Atleast the alerts informed what was happening, and blocked some of the low level attacks.
Note: the admin account can also be removed altogether, or disable in configuration.
Interestingly,
The xxx.com is
a company that provides "penetration testing, internal network auditing and social engineering services." I wrote to the email mentioned in whois for that ip, lets see what happens.
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My 2c on: securing a WordPress site, and WordFence configuration/setup (and the performance hampering it does).
🔧 BikeGremlin guides & resources
We use security ninja for some sites. It is a more aggressive version than WF I thought. But not noticed major performance Difference from WF.
Interesting read!
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It's a good idea to restrict wp-login.php access to your ips/networks so cpu is not wasted by bots trying passwords...
Tried Ghost once, it was fine, pretty fast, but the flexibility you get with WP is just amazing.
The LiteSpeed plugin is AMAZING.
And the Prestashop one is terrific as well!
To that end doing an extremely simple .htaccess level user and password cuts down on a huge amount of brute attacks for wp-admin. Cpanel and direct admin I believe even have a simple page for it.
Additionally make sure to remove the "author" listing for posts/pages so it doesn't show up at all. That's how most of that bots get the username assuming you rightfully aren't using something like admin.
Your simple lock out plugin can then do instant blocks on anyone trying to use admin.
Simple stuff but really helps block out a lot of the stuff out there
I'm also using All In One (Maybe a different plugin - by ServMask) and I've had nothing but success. I had to move a site between servers and reinstalling and importing was easier than correcting a broken config and manually migrating. Never had any issues except some PHP limits that needed changing.
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail
It works pretty smooth. Have you paid monthly for a commercial license though, or did you get the one-time payment and just move(d) "personal" (non-client) sites?
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
Hmm? Neither. Free plugin afaik?
Michael from DragonWebHost & OnePoundEmail