WordPress Running Slow? Get a New Engine...

WordPress Running Slow? Get a New Engine…

Although there’s tons of reasons that your WordPress installation is running slow (including poorly written plugins and themes), I believe the single biggest reason why people have problems is because of their hosting company. The additional need for social buttons and integrations compounds the issue – many of them load terribly slow as well.

People notice. Your audience notices. And they don’t convert. Having a page that takes longer than 2 seconds to load can exponentially increase the number of visitors that abandon your site… or worse… your shopping cart. For that reason, it’s essential that you work on improving your speed.

For WordPress, the savior has come with WP Engine:

WP Engine serves your blog really fast. First there’s the server stuff: We use only top-of-the line dedicated hardware, we spread your web requests and database queries across multiple boxes, and we’ve hand-built a WordPress-specific caching system that delivers pages in 15 milliseconds.
Then there’s the stuff inside WordPress itself: WP Engine compresses your content, minify CSS and JS, crunch bytes out of your images, and rewrite the WordPress HTML output to take advantage of more optimizations. And we’re the only WordPress hosting company who includes a fully-managed CDN service, where we serve your static content from “edge” servers all around the world, reducing latency by seconds.
WP Engine makes use of proxy servers, database and disk caching, file minification, image compression, and content delivery networks for your media. We’ll make sure you’re using plugins that don’t slow down your site.

I spent quite a few hours with the team at WP Engine migrating a very large site (this one) to see how it performed and it was fantastic working with them. We actually have a very large International client moving over to WP Engine in the next week, so we’ll be able to give it a real test drive! I’m excited to see a dedicated platform arise for WordPress to rid bloggers of all the headaches of performance tuning.

And yes – those links are affiliate links! Use CODE WPROCKS and get 10% your WP Engine account. Prices are very affordable – especially to the small, medium and large business markets. This appears to be the best solution I’ve found dedicated to WordPress on the market.

About Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in inbound marketing leveraging social media, blogging, search engine optimization, pay per click and public relations. Their clients include Angie's List, Mindjet, Webtrends, ChaCha and many more. Douglas is also the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies. If you're interested in having Douglas speak, please propose an event!

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Note: Comments are welcome from real people, not companies. Most comments with links will be deleted.

Anonymous

I’ve checked them out but my general problem with all these hosted WordPress shops is that you have to give up an element of control that’s unacceptable to me. Running a giant website requires me to have complete control over every aspect – including plugins and database access. Their pricing packages also don’t make sense in reality – $100/month for 250k pageviews and 100gb? What an arbitrary limit that I would hit in 2-3 weeks. I’m currently using Media Temple (and paying a lot for it) – and using every ‘optimization’ tool (cahcing, CDN, etc) available I can’t do load times better than 9-10 seconds. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s no silver bullet when it comes to getting WordPress to run fast. I’ve tried them all.
- http://www.marketingtechblog.com Douglas Karr
  
  You can control every aspect with them, Jonathan. Our site has a ton of customizations and plugins to get it to do everything we’d like. I believe the pricing is pretty good for the average corporate blog… the average person doesn’t know how to configure CDNs and caching so this is definitely under that cost. BTW: We use Mediatemple as well… with a CDN and Cloudflare and it’s simply not performing as well as we’d like.
  - Chris
    
    Are you hosting the WordPress site on Media Temple’s grid server or a dedicated virtual server? I had a simple site hosted with (mt) for 2 years on the grid and load times were just horrible, ridiculously slow and the admin area was just a grueling pain in the arse. Did I mention the whole experience was absolutely horrible?
    
    I did everything possible under the sun to optimize my site except purchase a grid container and nothing worked. Optimized it with minify, WP Super Cache, etc. I even tried using CloudFlare on another wp hosted site but the load times are ridiculous. 20 seconds to load the home page?
    
    I decided to move my site to Hostgator and the speed increase tripled overnight. I do still miss the (mt) control panel which is incredible but the speed of my site trumps a nice looking interface.
    
    Now I am shopping for a new web host again but this time I will need to install multisite with the ability to host 10 micro sites within it. I have been looking at (mt) dedicated virtual, WP Engine and Page.ly. Media Temple seems to be a much better deal and I was already burned by them on the grid, but I wonder if their dedicated virtual will give me the speed boost I need and the ease of use that comes with their control panels.
    - http://blog.asmartbear.com Jason Cohen
      
      MT is only a “deal” if you want a machine without any specific support for WordPress. If you want to do security yourself, speed yourself, scalability yourself, a CDN yourself (and pay for it).
      
      And then there’s high-availability. Both because of software and hardware issues, a one-server installation can’t be as highly-available as a cluster.
      
      In our view, trying to save $20/mo but having to do all that stuff yourself isn’t a good use of time or money. It’s easier for us because we amortize the cost of all that over all our customers; it’s just too much to be sensible for a single site to do if you’re not TechCrunch.
      - Chris
        
        Thanks Jason. I’m shooting you guys some info through your site for a quote.
- http://blog.asmartbear.com Jason Cohen
  
  Hi Joanathan, I understand where you’re coming from, but you haven’t tried it all yet if you haven’t tried us.
  
  Those limits are a guide — we don’t turn off your site or anything if you hit them, it just means it costs us more and it will cost you more too. We can talk about it.
  
  We’ve had lots of people unable to optimize past a certain point, but then see improvements with us. Because: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure .
  
  Also, we *do* give you control over plugins, custom code, and database access, so don’t assume that we’ll lock you out!
  
  Instead, why not give us a chance… move a copy of your blog, then send me an email (jason at wpengine) and let’s see what we can do.
- Anonymous
  
  9-10 seconds is unacceptable. Personally i found switching from Thesis to the Woo framework made my site significantly slower. I was loading at 3 seconds and now its way slower.
  
  I’ve found VPS is far better than shared hosting and moved several sites to MT which is a gimmick and hassle in my opinion as well as far too expensive
  
  You can get VPS with cPanel for usd$35 a month and cheaper for yearly packages. Cheaper again for VPS with Plesk
  - RonStrilaeff
    
    Hi Brad… If you don’t mind me asking .. where did you get “VPS with cPanel for usd$35 a month”
    
    Is that at MT? You say you moved several sites there but what is their gimmick? Are you happy with them?
    
    I’m a bit confused by your comments.
- Anonymous
  
  9-10 seconds is unacceptable. Personally i found switching from Thesis to the Woo framework made my site significantly slower. I was loading at 3 seconds and now its way slower.
  
  I’ve found VPS is far better than shared hosting and moved several sites to MT which is a gimmick and hassle in my opinion as well as far too expensive
  
  You can get VPS with cPanel for usd$35 a month and cheaper for yearly packages. Cheaper again for VPS with Plesk
http://www.dknewmedia.com Douglas Karr

Anonymous, I think you’ll find these folks are quite a bit different. First, you have SFTP access so you can make the changes you need to on the plugin side. Since you have full file access, you can do whatever you’d like with the database. I, too, am on MediaTemple and I’m utilizing caching and CDN… but you and I are a rare breed. If someone doesn’t understand how to optimize for page speed, WP Engine is a perfect solution since they worry about the performance so you don’t need to. The volume of pageviews and bandwidth far outweighs what the average corporate blogger requires. If you were to hire a professional to optimize your site and configure a CDN, it would cost much, much more.
Anonymous

Good lord your website loads fast.
- http://www.marketingtechblog.com Douglas Karr
  
  Not yet – but it will!
  - Anonymous
    
    Really? I thought you already migrated. If not, you’re doing pretty good with speed as it is.
    - http://www.marketingtechblog.com Douglas Karr
      
      I started using Cloudflare – check it out, it’s a free service and has taken quite a load off of our hosting servers at Mediatemple. It’s not the fastest, but overall speed is improving because of it.
      - Anonymous
        
        Awesome. I’ll have to check them out. Ironically, my favorite feature of WPEngine when I checked it out wasn’t the speed or the distribution. It was the 1-click staging. How sweet is that?
      - Anonymous
        
        Awesome. I’ll have to check them out. Ironically, my favorite feature of WPEngine when I checked it out wasn’t the speed or the distribution. It was the 1-click staging. How sweet is that?
Anonymous

I suspect that anything involving Jason Cohen will be solid gold. I never had a need for his CodeCollaborator, being a single-person team, LOL. But, I’ve been following him and studying his philosophy for over two years.

When he first wrote about WP Engine, I was intrigued. Of course, he retweets it from time to time and that’s how I popped in today.

Ironically, I’m probably not ready for WP Engine, yet, so I will be loooking into CloudFlare.

Cheers,

Mitch
Anonymous

I suspect that anything involving Jason Cohen will be solid gold. I never had a need for his CodeCollaborator, being a single-person team, LOL. But, I’ve been following him and studying his philosophy for over two years.

When he first wrote about WP Engine, I was intrigued. Of course, he retweets it from time to time and that’s how I popped in today.

Ironically, I’m probably not ready for WP Engine, yet, so I will be loooking into CloudFlare.

Cheers,

Mitch
Jonathan Thomas

As a follow up to this conversation – I ended up switching hosting for Anglotopia.net to Wpengine and my site is running a lot faster. I’m keeping the MT server for some other sites where load time isn’t an issue but for now Anglotopia is where it needs to be.
http://tjosm.com/ Tharindu Kumara

it’s too expensive for single site. I’ll go for unmanaged VPS instead. I’ll have unlimited domains and caching systems like xcache.

About Douglas Karr

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