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Lilap
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Lilap

Does resizing Dropet to larger Plan = Increase Page Load/Performance?

September 20, 2016 2.7k views
Nginx PHP Deployment Scaling Ubuntu 16.04

Hello,

This may be quite a stupid question as I have been reading up on things to improve loading times and also performance on my Droplet but cannot get a straight answer from these articles.

My question is, if I were to resize/upgrade my Droplet to the plan above it, will it increase the performance and decrease page loading times?

Or will it stay the same if I had the same amount of visitors on the website on both droplets?

Thanks

2 comments
  • varvy September 21, 2016

    Some of the pro tips

    1. Use W3 total cache and set up properly
    2. Enable browser caching and gzip to reduce the amount of bandwidth for returning visitors.
    3. Minimize and compress css/js files.
    4. Use less CSS in critical rendering path or use critical path toll to determine and fix the issue.
    5. Use good themes eg: genesis, schema, divi etc.
    6. Reduce image size using tinypng

    Currently i'm using $5 plan for my website https://varvy.in/ and it's loading very fast. I used all the techniques and got 100 pagespeed score (mobile/desktop).
    Share your website link, so i can suggest some more tips.

  • Therock November 8, 2016

    I don't think your website is any fast. Your first byte takes 1.1 seconds to deliver on post pages. That's 600% worst than what it should be. https://gtmetrix.com/reports/varvy.in/KIjnNjV1
    Your homepage is 10kb loading in 1.3 seconds.
    But you got As on those tests.
    I use Schema and my homepage is 500kb and opens in 0.7 seconds but post pages open in 2.4
    I don't have As like you as grades but my site is faster. I am on a 10$ plan tho.

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1 Answer
xMudrii September 20, 2016
Accepted Answer

Upgrading droplet will help you if you have high-load and high number of visitors. If you don't have high-load, high number of visitors, you should optimize website.
I can recommend you running Google PageSpeed Insights.
Go there, enter your website link, click on analyze and violla.
Some of recommended steps would be:
1. Optimizing your page images:
Compress images. This is pretty important. Sometimes you can compress 70-80%. This is a lot. Myself, I use Tinypng, and it is working excellent. You should compress all images you have via it.
Use PNG or JPG. If you need animations use GIF.
If you have images with geometric shapes use SVG.
Learn more about it on Google Developers site.

2. Enable gzip compression on nginx:
You can learn more about it in following DigitalOcean tutorial.

3. Minify your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code:
If this is possible, you should think about this. This should not be hard if you made yourself site. Well if you use Wordpress or anything like that, you will have fun time. :)

This is in some basic lines what is mostly problems.
If it give everything right, consider upgrading your droplet

How To Add the gzip Module to Nginx on Ubuntu 14.04
How fast a website will load depends on the size of all of the files that have to be downloaded by the browser. Reducing the size of files to be transmitted can make the website not only load faster, but also cheaper to those who have to pay for their bandwidth usage. In this guide, we'll discuss how to configure Nginx installed on your Ubuntu 14.04 server to utilize `gzip` compression to reduce the size of content sent to website visitors.
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  • Lilap September 20, 2016

    Hello again :)

    Thank you for your guide, I will try the Gzip guide and see how it goes. I decided to try out the Vultr servers since I am located in Australia and most of my clients are from New Zealand and Australia.

    I did some pingdom tests and gtmetrix tests. Before, I was on the SFO2 server and was getting roughly 2.8s Load time but the testing servers were in Canada and I did a test from an Australia server which went up to 7s load time.

    I tested it out here when I transferred the files again to the Australian servers and got 2.4s load time and 4.4s for Canada.

    Still a bit unhappy but unsure. Is this a good page speed? The website is a huge photography content website and has a lot to load.

    Just wanted to make sure that my clients have a smooth and fast experience since most of the content get's uploaded live during an event.

    Also are you able to message me? I have the SSL from Let's encrypt but cannot seem to make the Https green, it is currently red with a cross.

    Thank you again for all your help! Definitely helped me out a lot. Hope other people can read these and help them out too!

  • Lilap September 20, 2016

    Alright, so I was trying out some new things and turns out that disabling Photon + Jetpack decreases my load time down to 1.4s. Still unhappy so will keep tinkering.

    • Vaielab September 20, 2016

      What is the size of your webpage?
      And do you use cache?
      Is is static content or dynamic?
      Linked to a database?

      • Lilap September 20, 2016

        After some more tweaking. I managed to get it down to 800ms

        What is the size of your webpage?
        3MB, working on reducing this.

        And do you use cache?
        No, just Cloudflare, will be looking into adding a cache.

        Is is static content or dynamic?
        Mostly static.

        Linked to a database?
        Yes, all linked.

        • Vaielab September 20, 2016

          If it's mostly statics content, at least, you should use the browser cache to help you.
          Try using yslow (firefox / chrome plugin) to test where your webpage could have a bottleneck

          • Lilap September 20, 2016

            I believe it might be something to do with the "external css" files that need to be combined. I have roughly 34 and it is an F grade at High priority. Might be one of the reasons why it is slowing down the page load.

            Any idea on how to combine these files without having to go into each one to copy and paste?

        • Vaielab September 20, 2016

          Not sure why, but I can reply to your last comment, so I'll reply here.
          There are a lots of way to do so

          • If you are using a framework or cms, there is probably already a plugin for this.
          • If not, you could use gulp to automatically merge all your js / css in one file
          • You could use a server side script (PHP, asp.net, java...) to merge them (but use cache, don't remerge at each request)
          • Or do it manually (far from the best method)
          • Lilap September 21, 2016

            Hello,

            Yes I am using wordpress.

            I will look into gulp and have been looking into server side caching instead of using plugins.

            Would there be an advantage to this? Since I do not want to bloat wordpress too much. Does Nginx automatically come with Fastcgi? or do I need to install this separately?

            Thanks

        • xMudrii September 21, 2016

          @Lilap for some reason I was not able to reply on your latest comment but I will here instead.

          You should consider W3 Total Cache plugin.
          Beside basic caching, e.g. pages, posts, there are options for:
          caching HTML, JS, CS
          minification of HTML, JS, CS
          caching of objects and database objects.
          For full list of features follow link.

          There is also WP Super Cache.

          I would recommend you trying with W3 Total Cache. In my experience it is very good plugin and will definitely help you.

          Also you can research about server side caching with Varnish + W3 Total Cache.

          If you want to learn more about FastCGI caching, check out this tutorial. Older, but still can do its job :)

          How to Setup FastCGI Caching with Nginx on your VPS
          by Jesin A
          Here's how to setup FastCGI caching with Nginx on your VPS.
          • Lilap September 21, 2016

            Lol, no one seems to be able to reply to my comments too! No idea what is going on here.

            I am trying out W3 Total Cache but thought maybe having it server side will be better? As in integrating into the server system rather than having it on Wordpress?

            I will look into using Gulp as suggested by another commenter and look at using FastCGI as well. Then I wouldn't need to use W3 Total Cache.

            Do you have any experience with MariaDB and would you recommend that over Mysql? Since I have been reading that this also increase page speed load times due to faster database queries.

        • xMudrii September 21, 2016

          @Lilap again, not able to reply. Don't worry, nothing on your side, looks like there is limit on DO Q&A number of childs.

          Personally, I would test with plugin first, than with server side caching. Server side caching is not something easy as 1, 2, 3. With plugin you can do it much faster in my opinion, it's just important to config it right.

          If you want to test does plugin takes a lot of time to load, use P3. I used it myself and I can say it works pretty well.

          About MySql and MariaDB, I don't know what to say, this is not something I tested. By some basic knowledge I would say, with both, basic query will execute with 0.0001 sec with both MySql/Maria. Wordpress database are usually small, and doesn't have complex queries so I really don't know.

          Something does I remember reading is Redis caching. I don't know is it really working, but it can be tried.

          How To Configure Redis Caching to Speed Up WordPress on Ubuntu 14.04
          by Scott Miller
          Redis is an open-source key value store that can operate as both an in-memory store and as cache. Redis is a data structure server that can be used as a database server on its own, or paired with a relational database like MySQL to speed things up. For this tutorial, Redis will be configured as a cache for WordPress to alleviate the redundant and time-consuming database queries used to render a WordPress page. The result is a WordPress site that is much faster.
          • Lilap September 21, 2016

            Hi xMudrii,

            Sounds great, I just thought that having too many plugins would slow the site down and having server side but does the same things as the plugin does will have no effect on speed.

            As for the Mysql and Maria, I might leave it to Mysql for the time being and see how I go.

          • Lilap September 22, 2016

            Alright so here's an update. I was playing around with W3 Total Cache and was not happy with the results it being around 2secs at 3mb page file.

            Some of the pages wouldnt even fully load but thinks it is loaded.

            I disabled it, cleared it and did some block configuration.

            So there is absolutely no plugin caching for wordpress, then bam.

            I got 1 sec with 2.4mb loading times on Pingdom.

            Still scratching my head as to how this works but it must be something to do with the plugins!?

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