Site Improvements

Last week I quietly moved this site over to a new server and performed a ton of under-the-hood improvements to it:

  1. It’s now powered by WordPress Multisite and domain mapping running atop a customized LEMP stack on Ubuntu 12.04; working with nginx really is a treat after dealing with a lacking sense of site snappiness for so long
  2. It’s additionally assisted by various types of APC caching and minification (I’m personally on the W3 Total Cache side of the fence)
  3. It’s gone almost fully HTTPS[1. I’m a fan of Jetpack but it’s been a pain to work with during the transition. Gravatars on post likes are causing mixed content warnings, Photon doesn’t seem to like that I’m on HTTPS (I think there’s a workaround for this), and an out-of-the-box Jetpack install hit my server with around 10-15 Javascript requests and 8-10 CSS requests. This may or may not be a problem under certain environments, but I found that I needed to concatenate my CSS and JS to reduce load times.], courtesy of an SSL certificate purchased through DigiCert, which has won me over with its fine customer service

The $20/month savings moving forward and newly acquired knowledge for making WordPress feel like I’m on localhost were well worth the time.

Author: Philip Arthur Moore

CEO at We Cobble. We build digital products for people.™

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