Why Is My Website Slow?

Snail

This is a question we are asked by people on a regular basis: “Why is my website slow?” The answer provided here, since 2012, is generally speaking in a WordPress context – because we are WP specialists – but a lot of the rules will apply to really any website, particularly one which runs on …

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How To: Leverage Browser Caching for Images, CSS and JS

Ever checked your website speed using GTmetrix, Pingdom, PageSpeed or Yslow… or any of the other many and various latest and greatest speed checking tools? ***2021 update: take a look at Lighthouse Well, if you have, you might have come across a request to “leverage browser caching…” or similar. What does “Leverage Browser Caching” actually …

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Minimum Requirements for WooCommerce

Below are the minimum requirements for WooCommerce and (by extension) WordPress. Some are taken from WooCommerce, some from WordPress, and also, some, we are adding as recommendations. It should be apparent, below, which is which! Before getting started, if you’re here to assess a WooCommerce host, then you may be interested to check out our …

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Installing XCache on Amazon EC2

We’ve been benchmarking Amazon EC2 server instances for some highly complicated PHP applications over the past week. During this time, we’ve discovered that XCache is perhaps the best opcode caching product for our purposes. If anyone would like a walkthrough for installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance, simply leave a comment below and we …

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How to Block an IP Address from accessing your website

Looking to block a specific IP address from accessing your website? Maybe you saw some rogue activity, and its coming from a specific IP? Perhaps some IP address you can see spidering through all your content – and its not a search robot? Whatever the reason, if you’re looking to block a specific IP address …

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Local Time in London – Display in a WordPress website

A long while back, I wrote a short piece about how to make Linux servers set their local time to Europe -> London, which you can find here. Today, I’m going to show you how to post a quick snippet into your WordPress to allow you to display what the local time is anywhere in …

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How to Setup FTP (FTPS (not SFTP)) on an AWS EC2 Instance

Below are the commands required to setup FTP (well, FTPS in fact, and specifically not SFTP, which you can most easily use by adding your security certificate to your FTP program and accessing over SSH) on your AWS EC2 cloud instance. I’m assuming you use the AWS flavour of Linux. If you do not use …

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Find out Apache, MySQL, PHP (etc) versions via Plesk

Are you running Plesk on your dedicated server or VPS? Do you want or need to know what version of MySQL, PHP, Apache – or anything else – your box is running, to relate to a client or stakeholder? If you would like to find your Apache version and you do not have Plesk, click …

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Example CodeIgniter .htaccess for mod_rewrite

If you are like Silicon Dales, a few years back, you would have used CodeIgniter (CI) probably quite a lot 5-6 years ago, but perhaps not so much “these days” on projects. We have a number of clients with legacy CI sites, and sometimes, we need to move them around and configure them. For this …

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How to: Find out Apache version from Command Line (SSH)

Have you logged into your server or VPS via command line (SSH – this is really the best and only way to do this now – Telnet is not going to encrypt your communications… this is bad!) and are now wondering how to quickly discover what version of Apache you are running? Find your Apache …

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