Last week I quietly moved this site over to a new server and performed a ton of under-the-hood improvements to it:
- 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
- It’s additionally assisted by various types of APC caching and minification (I’m personally on the W3 Total Cache side of the fence)
- 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.
