WordPress now powers over 25% of sites on the web including big names such as Time, CNN, TechCrunch and more. What changes about a WordPress site when it needs to function on such a large scale? Keanan Koppenhaver will show us how WordPress can be tweaked to serve content to millions of visitors per month, how to keep code modular using custom-built plugins, special considerations for enterprise-sized sites and more! If you've ever wondered what goes into creating and maintaining a high-traffic WordPress site, this will be one you won't want to miss.
Keanan Koppenhaver is a Digital Product Developer and Consulting Engineer with doejo, a WordPress VIP Partner Agency. While at doejo, he has worked on baking WordPress into the publishing workflow of one of the largest investment news publications in the United States, a WordPress-backed real estate investment portal, and many other projects large and small. He is passionate about mentoring other developers as well as teaching people that WordPress can be more than just a blogging platform. Keanan writes about all these topics and more at http://levelupwp.net.
8. What is WordPress VIP?
• Managed Hosting by Automattic
• Serves just over 22 billion page views/month
• Includes Security, Code Review, and much more
• Hosted on the same platform that powers millions
of blogs on WordPress.com
9. WordPress.Com Serves 70,000 Req/Sec
And Over 15 Gbit/Sec Of Traffic (2012)
Source: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/9/26/wordpresscom-serves-70000-
reqsec-and-over-15-gbitsec-of-traf.html
16. What kind of traffic are we
talking about?
• 4-6 million pageviews / month
• 20,000 page views / hour (during the work day)
• 5 page views every second (among 100s of
concurrent connections)
30. Front End Caching
• Cache stored on the user’s machine
• Specified expiration date when the asset is “stale”
• Saves the server from serving these assets that
don’t change
• Advanced Mode: Cache busting URL string
• Super Advanced Mode: CDN
32. https://memcached.org/
Memcached is…often used to speed up dynamic
database-driven websites by caching data and
objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an
external data source (such as a database or API)
must be read.
33. Backend Caching
• Memcached saves web server and database
server
• Prevents blocking DB calls
• Must be flushed when changes are made
34. Phil Carlton, Tim Bray, Jeff Atwood, and many others
There are two hard things in computer science:
cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one
errors.
43. Automated Deployments
• No more manual FTP
• Deploy from Version Control
• Ensure pre- and post-deployment steps are the
same every time
• Deployment == One Less Thing To Think About
46. DON’T: Dump everything in
functions.php
• Multiple files with grouped functions
• Namespacing
• Sanity when Searching
• lib/*
48. DON’T: Dump everything in
functions.php (Part 2)
• Bigger than a group of functions? Feature Plugin.
• Pros: Can be maintained independently
• Cons: Has to be maintained independently
49. DO: Keep request count low
• Ad Networks, Analytics, Social Integration, etc
• Maximum simultaneous connections (per
browser)
• Think of the mobile users
• Luckily, Dev Tools has your back