Checklist step by step to fastest site Wordpress + WooCommerce

December 3, 2014 7.5k views
agencia82
By:
agencia82

Hello everyone,
I am very enthusiastic learning how to built some Droplets with the help of comunity tutorials. Even though I know nothing about Linux. I'm learning a little bit day by day.
Well, my goal to came here in Digital Ocean is to built a faster perfect server for Wordpress.
I realized some preferences is for Ubuntu instead of CentOS.
Many communities also report that nginx is better than apache for CMS like Wordpress.
Well, is there any checklist step by step to the fastest possible option order to assemble a server for Wordpress?
I'll need to wordpress running a small e-commerce using the WooCommerce plugin and emails?
What I should to choose?
OS - Ubuntu ( ) x ( ) CentOS
Web - Nginx ( ) x ( ) Apache
Php - What are the necessary modules to install? All? Mod_Rewrite... allocate about 512Mb to php...
Cache - Varnish (need?)
FTP - I need to provide FTP access to my client FileZilla
Email Client - What should I install? Maybe MX entries to google apps for work is a good option
Host PC - ZPanel?
Other stuffs - Swapfile, caching, CDN and anything that makes the Wordpress faster than any other host.

Finally, my goal is to keep a Snapshot of this perfect Droplet and to create others, one for each site.
What do you think?
I thank you for all the help

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD December 3, 2014

If you are new to Linux I would recommend starting with our Wordpress application image. This way you can start out with a working Wordpress installation and then move on to adjustments and optimizations.

This image will provide you with a LAMP droplet (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) with Wordpress installed and configured with a basic configuration. From there you can look into:

Caching plugins: there are several free plugins available for wordpress that will enable some additional caching, speeding up your site and reducing load on your droplet.

CDN/CloudFlare: The quickest way to speed up your site and ensure that it can handle increased load is to set up CloudFlare or another reverse proxy service for your domain. With this, requests for your site are passed through their servers which will cache content and reduce the load on your droplets.

Swap: If you are using a smaller droplet you will likely want to set up a swap file to prevent your droplet from exhausting it's available memory. This guide will assist you with that.

FTP: All droplets support SFTP by default using your ssh credentials so there is nothing additional needed to connect to your droplet via Filezilla. (You will need to log in at least once via ssh after you create your droplet in order to replace the temporary password before you will be able to make an SFTP connection)

Email: Going with Google Apps is a good option. If you choose to run your own mail services I would recommend hosting mail on a different droplet than your Wordpress site.

Additional options:

When you are ready you could consider splitting up your web and database services on two different droplets, switching to nginx, or setting up load balancing among multiple droplets serving your site.

How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 14.04
by Justin Ellingwood
Swap space can be used as an "overflow" area for your system when you run out of RAM. The operating system can store data that would normally be kept in RAM on the hard drive in a specially formatted file. In this guide, we'll demonstrate how to create and use one of these files in Ubuntu 14.04.
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  • agencia82 December 5, 2014

    Alright, I just get start with Wordpress 14.04 image.
    I already created an user;
    Change SSH port and disable permit root login;
    Create a swapfile 2Gb;
    Config TimeZone and installed NTP;

    So now on. What I should do?
    I think about:
    phpMyAdmin;
    I'll need e-mail too but I don't know how to start
    an host cp like zpanel

    after all I forget to ask: How can I config DNS for each droplet on may account to be a site with quilied domain e.g.: one droplet is somesite.com, another droplet is anothersite.com?

    I want to prepare my droplet to use like an image to multiply my sites.

    Thank you for help!

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