A few days ago I recruited a WordPress server expert to improve the performance of my very slow site, as I was tired of having an extremely slow site. One of the conditions of accepting the job was that Chris has to to keep track of all the changes he made, so that I could share them in a series of WordPress Blog And Server Optimisation posts.
The progress he has made already has been astounding and I’m sure that regular readers will agree. Even Chris is amazed by how much progress he has made:
Everton,
I wanted to share the CPU utilization graph with you. I’ve been tracking it since the beginning. I highlighted the most major changes with the biggest impact. Of course there were others (which I have documented).
The data points on this graph are 10 minute averages. You can really see when your busiest times of the day are for traffic
Before I started on anything, you were peaking at over 60% CPU load to user processes plus another 15% for the system (75%).
Yesterday, during peak hours, you peaked at just over 20% CPU load to user processes plus less than 5% for the system (25%).
I was sure that the changes that I was implementing (though there have been some technical defects along the way which are or are being worked out) would have positive impact, but I never expected it to be quite this drastic on such a high-traffic website.
I just wanted to share!
Chris Bianchi
Just check out the CPU Usage graph that Chris attached:
The traffic to my site has gone up this week, as well as my eCPMs, and I’m convinced this is because my slow loading speeds were driving away readers. In the next post I will start listing the tweaks and mods tha Chris has made. I really can’t wait to see how much faster this site will get once Chris and my designer start work on optimising my theme, as that is still to come, as well as further server and WordPress tweaks.
