There are number of ways to optimize your wordpress blog to increase the performance and loading time. Today we would like to tell you about how cloud computing can help you solve the performance issues of your website. Most of the time the images, CSS and other media are responsible for the slow loading time of your website.
There are number of solutions you can implement in order to solve this issue, one of the inexpensive and effective way is to host all your media and CSS files in the cloud. Today We will discuss how to implement the cloud solution to your wordpress website/blog.
Before We explain you about the cloud files, we would like to tell you about a interesting plugin called W3-Total Cache. Please download and activate this plugin in your wordpress dashboard before signing up for any cloud files account. Basically this plugin keeps a cached copy of your website in a seperate folder and displays that whenever a user access your website, this will decrease your page load time by 50-70%. You can check the performance of your website using pingdom tool, please do this before and after activating this plugin to see the difference. Once you have activated the plugin, please signup with any of the cloud files hosting provider. We are going to see how you can do this using Rackspace.
Please go to the rackspace official website – www.rackspace.com. Once you are in please browse through the products and find Cloud files, the pricing structure is very simple and straight forward
| Storage | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Unlimited Files | 15¢ / GB |
Bandwidth Pricing
| Bandwidth | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Bandwidth Out | 18¢ / GB |
| Bandwidth Out (CDN-Enabled) | 18¢ / GB |
| Bandwidth In | No Charge |
Once you are happy with the pricing you can signup for the service and your account will be setup in an hour if everything goes well. After setting up the account you will receive your unique API key to use in your website, this is used to upload files directly from your WordPress dashboard.
So, now under the W3-Total Cache menu in your dashboard you can find an option called CDN, where you should specify the cloud files provider name and api key. Once this is done, you can upload your files to the cloud, you may ask what is the benifit?. The answer is CDN – Content Delivery Network.
As soon as you host your media and CSS files with cloud files, your website files will be cached in various servers all over the world. So irrespective of the location of the end user, the website will start delivering files with higher speed. You can experience about 90% increase in performance. Many leading wordpress bloggers use cloud solution for their website, it is easy to get started. Although We have mentioned the procedure for implementing cloud computing, please refer to this link for more step by step information - http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2010/02/16/optimizing-your-wordpress-site/
Other useful links
W3-Total Cache plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/
WordPress - http://wordpress.org/
Amazon Webservices - http://aws.amazon.com/
