Hi everybody,
I have a site with 800.000 posts and 2.5 millon of monthly printed pages with 20000 daily visitors.
It is the digital version of a real printed newspaper leader in a state and has a peak of audiencie in an hour interval during the morning.
I am coming to wordpress, and your “Newspaper Theme” because it is more flexible, basically in everything. My old site had less images and are smaller compared with this theme with a fast optimiced custom code.
Honestly i feel scared with the quantity of images that I have now in the index page with your “Newspaper Theme”. Practically all modules comes with 1 or more images.
I am planning to upload the new site in a few weeks, but i will take care with the amount of internet bandwidth than this theme will use in my hosting instance.
Do you Have some experience with Photon (Free Jetpack CDN).?
Is it good for a site with our traffic ?
And which resources do you suggest for the hosting required to run your theme with our traffic?
Thanks!.
Hello,
I would recommend a dedicated server with at least 8 GB of ram. If the server is with SSD storage that will help with full page caching.
For cdn, I would recommend that you use cloudflare with it’s 20$/month plan https://www.cloudflare.com/plans . This cdn also caches other static content besides the images and it can be configured to cache the full pages in case of traffic spikes.
The wordpress install should be configured to cache the full pages with https://ro.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ – the SSD will help here. Or if you have at least ~16GB of ram you can use w3 total cache + memcached to cache the pages in RAM.
With a smaller budget, the theme should run on a VPS with 8 GB of ram + free cloudflare plan + caching plugin, please note that the theme only uses about 20% of the resources, the rest is used by WordPress itself, we benchmark it vs the default themes and I do performance audits periodically. My conclusion is that WordPress is a huge application 🙂 but if properly configured it can handle traffic well, mostly helped by full page caching.
Radu, what do you think of the 3 cloudflare options working with newspaper: http://screencast.com/t/mFYxmJxg31h
1) autominify (js, css, html) – some of these are done with the td booster plugin right? would it be ok to use these if I am not using the td booster plugin?
2) polish (on or off) says it improves image load time – will it interrupt or over optimize if you already have smushit?
3) Railgun (business plan offering for more, have you ever tried it? worth it as a compliment to the theme?)
Thanks!!
Just some input; I’d be cautious with autominify as that has caused problems with various folks; in many cases auto-minify of HTML is fine (we use mod_pagespeed for this); but for CSS and JS, I personally have found it’s better to MANUALLY do that (see my sticky optimization post topic on how to); as this ensures you know it works, and it’s not an “on the fly” issue but static from get-go.
Just some input on that one item 🙂
Thanks for the advice Chris! Not to add a layer of complexity but my hosting provider is wpengine and they supposedly do a lot of the server configuration to maximize the speed potential (mod_pagespeed is not available in their environment)
Hi,
this are our settings: http://screencast.com/t/R7UgN7ZeU We tested them and everything works ok. The javascript autminify may create problems so please test each optimization independently.
the railgun service is 200$/month and we did not test it.
