- Lightweight WordPress theme
- WordPress hosting provider
The Basics of Optimization
Types of WordPress Hosting Providers
A few days ago, we were honored to be mentioned by Kinsta and we went ahead to help the OceanWP users and the WordPress Community by trying out Cloudways, a WordPress managed hosting solution (you might have heard about them).
What is Cloudways?
Why Cloudways?
You might be thinking why I decided to give it a try, right? There are multiple reasons: one of them is that their cloud providers have more than 60 data centers around the globe that helps in reducing latency, which is an important factor to reach target audience effectively.
Furthermore, you can have a look at Cloudways features, a few of them are mentioned below:
- Pre-configured Varnish cache
- Support for PHP 5.6 and 7.x
- MySQL 5.6 & 5.7, support for MariaDB
- WordPress staging environment & temporary URLs
- Application & Server Cloning
- Unlimited sites on one server
- Unlimited servers under one account
- Free SSL certificates
- CloudwaysCDN (MaxCDN/StackPath in affordable pricing)
- Automated backups
- Auto-Healing Servers
- Team Members
- Git integration
- A lot operations can be done in just a few clicks
How to Install WordPress on Cloudways?
Step 1: Get an Account
First of all you, need to sign up for Cloudways Platform and verify your email address.
Use the promo code OWP20 to get 20% off on your first invoice.
Step 2: Launch Server
- WordPress as application
- Named application as TestOceanWP
- Named server as TestOceanWP
- Selected default projects
- Linode as the cloud provider
- Server size: 1GB
- Location: Fremont
Click Launch Now at the bottom right of the screen. It will take a few minutes to launch the desired server on Linode with WordPress installed.
Note: You don’t need a separate account on Linode to launch server at Cloudways Platform.
Step 3: Access WordPress Website
Once the server is ready, you will get a temporary/staging URL to test your newly created WordPress site, access it by going to the Applications tab from the top menu bar. Once testing is done, you can easily point the domain and take your WordPress website live. Here is how the Application Management screen looks like:
Step 4: Access Your Server
Although Cloudways manages the server for you yet it provides a control room from where you can alter settings at the server level. To access your server, navigate to Servers tab from the top-left menu bar and get into your server. Here is how the server control room looks like:
Now let’s start the performance benchmarks!
Performance on Default Settings
OceanWP & Other Plugins Installed
- Removed emoji support by adding few lines of code at the end of functions.php file of our child theme because most of the WordPress users do not use it.
- Marked all the checkboxes where Minification is labeled in the Basic options tab of Breeze.
- Enabled grouping of JS and CSS to reduce the number of requests by going to Advanced options tab on Breeze.
We can see the loading time is pretty impressive. But Pingdom Tools is displaying query string warning on “fontawesome” and “simple line icons”. If you are using any of them, keep it enable or disable by going to scripts and styles section. We have disabled it for now and here is the result.
Now everything is scored to 100.
OceanWP with Demo Data
Let’s insert demo data using Ocean Demo Import plugin. We have imported one of the most popular one-pager template Megagym along with all the data we are asked to import. Here is the result:
One thing to mention here, we have re-enabled “fontawesome” and “simple line icons” as they are required by Megagym template. The above warnings include both of them along with Google Maps.
For this guide, we are disabling Google Maps using Elementor but if you want to embed it anyway, try not to use it on home page as it is considered as the performance killer.
Wow! The performance grade and load time have been improved. Not only this, the page size and the number of requests also decreased because of the minification and grouping did by Breeze and the removal of Google maps that resulted in faster page loading experience. I know the grades aren’t 100 this time, it is because there are a few known things like “fontawesome” and “simple line icons” that are taking score down.
You can see, how well an optimized and lightweight WordPress theme (OceanWP) performs if used on a WordPress website hosted on an optimized WordPress hosting like Cloudways. We think it is good to opt for a specialized WordPress hosting and get the benefit of cloud hosting.
And the good news doesn’t stop here! 🙂
OceanWP has partnered up with Cloudways for your superb WordPress Experience yet!
Now you can purchase the Ocean Core Extensions Bundle, choose one of OceanWP WordPress website templates you wish to start with, and get everything installed on Cloudways servers with 1-click.
Life is easy. OceanWP and Cloudways are dedicated to provide you with more fun and less stress 😉
What do you think? And what are the most important factors that influence your choice of the hosting provider?
I think you mean “lightning”
Hi, yes, this is what it is written 🙂
Not in the graphic at the top 🙂
Oh yes, I will replace the image, thanks 🙂
Hey, wich plugin did you use to build the “Subscribe To The OceanWP Newsletter!” form on the blog? It’s simply amazing.
Hello, thank you 🙂
It is custom code and for the form, it is with the Forms widget of Elementor Pro.
Hey Nicolas,
Good to be reading this article.
Yes speed is a strong ranking factor and it starts with choosing the right host.
Nice presentation of Cloudways
Thank you 🙂
That’s an awesome comparison, Nicolas! Just got my Couldways account, hence, found your article here. Quick question, when you disable “fontawesome” and “simple line icons”, what kind of effect will there be on front end design?
Hello, the effect will be that your site will be faster 🙂
If you don’t need any icons on your site, feel free to disable them and disable also all the scripts you will don’t use.
What is the reason you chose to install WordPress on Linode instead of say, Digital Ocean? Is Linode in some way more “compatible” with WordPress?
Hello Jason, no particular reason, I used Linode before so I know their servers are good but I’m pretty sure you will have great results on Digital Ocean too 🙂
It’s pretty fast, but even your security headers grade “F” is pretty bad:
https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Foceanwp.org&followRedirects=on
Try the SlickStack in DigitalOcean or Linode, faster speed and better security, but similar environment. It is free LEMP script from LittleBizzy team in Github, try if you want. Cheers bro 😉
This article is very helpful for me. This definitely give me an idea about Cloudways. I think that this will surely help me to manage my business.Thanks for sharing this article.
Hey Nicolas,
Great to read for an article. It’s awesome as it speaks no questions asked! Cheers mate.
This article is very helpful for me. It helps me to manage my business. Thanks for sharing this article.
This article is so awesome that it helps me a bunch. Glad that I’ve found this article, saves me tons of time! Great work.