Speeding up my blog

Performance issues aren’t just for high traffic sites. I’m lucky if I get 50 visitors a day to this site, but by using scaling techniques popular with the big boys, I figured I could increase page load speeds, (good for visitors and good for SEO). If I could achieve this and use less resources, perhaps I could even save some money on my hosting bills. I currently run a 512MB VPS on Slicehost, and I’d rather not increase this right now.

With a few days off work, I decided to take the plunge and swap out some of the server tech powering this blog. From the bottom up, so to speak, this was as follows –

1. Replace Apache with Nginx (below)
2. Upgrade to PHP 5.3.3 and run as a FastCGI (next post)
3. Upgrade to WordPress 3
4. Deploy a CDN
5. Add a Varnish cache for extra speed

I’ll go through my experience across a number of posts, starting with Nginx. I shan’t replicate any existing documentation; I’m just going to go through what I did and point you at the resources you’ll need.
Continue reading…