Varnish is the server-side caching method of choice for numerous hosting companies. WPEngine, Cloudways and Flywheel, just to mention a few, use Varnish to deliver super fast page load times for their clients. One of the potential frustrations with Varnish can be making it work with e-commerce shops like WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. Typically … Learn more…
Monit is a powerful tool for making sure your server is running smoothly. Common uses for Monit are automatically restarting your services like nginx, Apache, SSH, MySQL and more. Monit can also be used for checking folder sizes and displaying them in the web interface (learn how). This guide will show you how to monitor … Learn more…
Algolia provide awesome WordPress search functionality. It is incredibly fast similar to what you get with Elasticseach though Algolia wins in benchmarks. Not everybody wants to host their own Elasticsearch cluster (read how) but they want faster WordPress search. Algolia is the answer for a hands-off solution. Algolia’s free hacker plan allows up to 10,000 records. For … Learn more…
EWWW Image Optimizer is my go to WordPress plugin for compressing my PNGs. EWWW Image Optimizer uses open source sofrware like OptiPNG and pngquant to reduce the image size after I upload them. I like to have the latest software in case of security patches, bugfixes or performance improvements. While the current Debian and Ubuntu versions … Learn more…
Previously I have shown how to upload WordPress backups to Dropbox without a WordPress backup plugin. If your site isn’t that large than Dropbox’s free limit of 2 GB may suit your needs. However, if you have a larger site then Google Drive may be a better option since you get 15 GB of space … Learn more…