Recommended plugins

Contents

1. ElasticPress
2. Varnish HTTP Purge
3. Redis Object Cache
4. TinyPNG

Recommended plugins

Looking to push the performance of your server even further? Then you should take a look at the following plugins. They'll make your already-superpowered WordPress server superpowered-er!

ElasticPress

To make use of the Elasticsearch server, you need the "ElasticPress" plugin. This plugin integrates WP_Query with elasticsearch. This will cause WP_Query to use elasticsearch instead of MySQL to make queries to the WordPress database.

Once the plugin installed, you need to go to the ElasticPress dashboard to tell it where to find the elasticsearch server. You should enter http://127.0.0.1:9200 as the "Elasticsearch Host". Once that's done, you can click the sync button in the upper right to index your content.

Varnish HTTP Purge

While Varnish has a solid WordPress configuration, it can't detect when you're making changes to posts. The "Varnish HTTP Purge" plugin notifies Varnish when you make changes to existing posts. It'll tell it to purge the relevant pages from the cache. This ensures that visitors always see the up-to-date post content. You will also need to refer to this cookbook if you want the "Purge Varnish" button to work.

Redis Object Cache

Your server comes preconfigured with Redis, but the object cache isn't installed by default. To use the object cache, you'll need to install this plugin.

TinyPNG

Your site might still feel slow even with the best configuration possible. That's because your visitors still need to download images on your page. If they aren't compressed, this can be an issue that affects performance. TinyPNG takes care of that. It's been found to give the best result in terms of compression.