What is WordPress?
WordPress is the most popular CMS (Content Management System) online. WordPress is used by 75 million websites including popular sites. The main advantage of WordPress is that its FREE to setup and constantly updating. And Its is flexible as There are a lot of themes to change its design with lots of plugins to extend its functions. There is even a FREE woocommerce plugin to help wordpress site turn into an ecommerce site that accepts PayPal and stripe payments.
The main purpose of WordPress is to setup blogging sites, business sites and simple ecommerce sites.
Why WordPress sites are so slow now?
Server technology and database Technology are evolving but most hosting companies are not upgrading their server/database technology to save costs. You may get lower cost as low as $1-$7 dollars a month but you are always using the older technology therefore your site will be slower.
Nowadays If you want to take advantage of the latest technology in Server which is openlitespeed servers and latest technology in database like Mariadb, you need to setup your own Virtual Private Servers or VPS. The process is half manual which could stopped some from venturing forward.
How much is Digitalocean openlitespeed mariadb wordpress site costs per month?
You can setup one droplet for as low as $5 per month.
You could use this link to get $100 credit for 2 months to test for yourself.
How to setup openlitespeed/mariadb wordpress site quickly?
After trying with a lot of options like hosting companies and more, I think the fastest way to make use of the latest technology to make fast WordPress site is to use the Digitalocean.com’s One click setup APP called “OpenLiteSpeed WordPress One-Click app”. (You get $100 credit for 2 months if you use the link.)
First you need to login (signup digitalocean with your google account for free).
Then you need to choose the marketplace and fing the “OpenLiteSpeed WordPress One-Click app” This image has several great performance enhancements, including LiteSpeed’s popular LSCache optimization plugin. This WordPress + OpenLiteSpeed + LSCache image tends to be more than 300 times faster than a regular WordPress image! It automatically installs OpenLiteSpeed, LSCache, WordPress and any dependences. It also automates initial setup for components like Object Cache and PHP OPCache to reduce the time it takes to optimize a web server.
Click the “OpenLiteSpeed WordPress One-Click app” and create a droplet. I choose the $5 a month plan and choose a server near to my audience which is Singapore. I think I would use the wordpress backup plugin so I did not choose backup droplet option.
From the project panal, click the newly created droplet and you will find a console button at the end of the droplet entry. Click the button to open the console.
If you do not have domain, just say No to “do you have a verified domain?” question and you will need to setup domain and SSL later.
Next you will will need to open your project folder and find the IP address for your droplet besides the droplet name. The address is nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn where n is a number.
Type the ip address into a browser like this to see your site (you need to install wordpress first to see the default site). To install the WordPress site you type nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn/wp-admin
The Cons
Well Digitalocean does not provide Domain Email service so you have to engage either Zoho free for domain email or use Google Domain email for domain email.
Conclusion
Well done, now you have WordPress site with the latest technology and fastest speed.