Change of hosting to speed up load times in WordPress

Update 24th of August 2013: Read at the bottom of the post how this went.

After going through all technical aspects of this site, I have come to the conclusion that there is not much more we can do with WordPress to speed up the loading  times of the site. So, it’s time to look for other measures that can help – even if it just helps marginally. Anything helping speed up the pages is helpful when it comes to our ranks in the search results.

So I have already tested using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) without it really doing much to get faster load times. It was about the same speed as on our own dedicated server in Oslo.

So, next up is wpengine, that claims to have the fastest hosting of WordPress in the industry.

I am now going to sign up for wpengine for a year, and will ask out technician to move the site over to it. I will keep you updated on the progress and what we experience down the road. When the site is running in their network I will tell you about it so you can check if it helped.

Right now the loading time for this page is around 5 secounds more or less. My goal is to get it down to less than a second.

What is your experience with wpengine? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Update: Oh Boy! Are they faster? YES! Very! The pages loads in less than a second now. I’m very pleased with WP Engine.

Update:

It turned out that the load speeds did not really have anything to do with the hosting after all. When I initially set up the site in WordPress, I wanted to make it multilingual, and used WPML for this purpose. I did some serious miss-configurations, that caused a lot of problems.

My experience with wpengine has not been as I had hoped, so the site is back again on our own server in Oslo, Norway.

wpengine has a few problems that don’t rally end. It has been a constant problem during the whole year with a 503 Bad Gateway message while saving posts and pages. Also, they are pretty harsh on not allowing many plugins because of the resources the plugins are using. I also find their hosting to be a bit too pricey comparing to what I feel they provide.

I’m not saying you should stay away from wpengine. I’m just saying they are not for our needs.

What is your experience with wpengine?

Use the comment form below to have your say.

Last Updated on August 24, 2013 by Bjorn Solstad

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