Speed considerations – your advice please

xmarksthespot

#247290

I am building a new site. I’m not a developer but I have a little technical knowledge.

I bought S&F Pro yesterday, mainly for its AJAX filtering capability – and was able to get up and running with a posts filter quite quickly. Thumbs up.

My questions are about speed/indexing – so with the answers I can then design the site in the ‘best’ way for users.

First, some background. Currently, I am just using *standard* posts, i.e. no custom post types. Posts are categorised, e.g. case studies, testimonials, news etc. Posts are tagged, with some tags being used across categories.

I have set up a Case Studies page https://d.xmarksthespot.co.uk/treasure-hunt-case-studies/ in which posts from the case study category are ’embedded’.

I’ve used S&F Pro for the simple AJAX filter you can see. (Ignore any duplicate filters on the same page – that’s the subject of a separate support question).

In the Filter I’ve set an Include for the ‘Case Studies’ category and also an Include for tags ‘Private’ and ‘Corporate’.

The Case Studies have other tags too (4-5 per case study) – e.g. where the event that’s the subject of the case study took place (London, Bruges, Cotswolds etc), Event theme, Group type etc.

Until the volume of Case Studies increase the simple filter is fine for now. I envisage quickly building to 30-40 case studies of about 400 words each then adding one a month thereafter – so very modest volumes IMO. The number of unique tags across the Case Studies could be of the order of 100.

Case Studies will probably account for about 15-20% of the total posts.

I am not wedded to how the data is currently held or classified and can change this if there are speed benefits to the user in doing so. If changes provide ongoing admin benefits too then that’s a bonus.

So, my question – at last…

To get the results returned quickly, should I be designing this in a different way? For example is there anything significant to be gained by having Case Studies as a CPT rather than as a category within Posts and using ‘Include’?

One might assume that with small volumes and an indexed search cache that there should be no appreciable difference either way but just curious as I have an opportunity to get this right from the start.

What do you think?

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Trevor Moderator

#247389

The server stack and its configuration are critical to response times when a site is presented with an ad hoc request that necessitates repeated calls to the WordPress database, rather than providing cached content. If the server uses WHM/cPanel or Plesk or similar, there is a good chance that it will be slow. If it has a custom stack optimized for WordPress, it might be fine.

Some hosting solutions, such as those offered by WP Engine, Siteground, Cloudways, have highly customized and optimized stacks (often further custom options are available), and also custom server admin panels, and they can be up 20 times faster than dedicated servers at actually delivering content (although searching will still be the slowest part of a site).

ElasticSearch on the server also appears to offer speed improvements. It can be implemented in WordPress with the ElasticPress plugin, and some code in the functions.php to allow our plugin to use it. My personal hosting company (Cloudways) now offer ElasticSearch as a free one-click install (note our plugin business site uses WP Engine, not Cloudways).

If the server has memcache/memcached (depends on PHP version), redis, varnish and ElasticSearch it will be faster. The issue is the bottleneck in the server when it has to fetch and process the data to find the matching posts for the search.

Servers that cache the database tables (and indexes) in the CPU L1 or L2 cache will thus be much faster. This is very much a dark art on the part of hosting companies.

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xmarksthespot

#247465

Trevor – from what you’re saying it seems like I needn’t get too hung up on the design but instead rather focus on the hosting overall. My current host uses Plesk. Thanks for the info. Very helpful.

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Trevor Moderator

#247473

If you are in design mode, I would get that done and worry about the speed when done. If you need to, switching hosts or changing hosting package whilst staying with the same host is relatively easy. If you want to talk, just ask.

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xmarksthespot

#247481

Yes, will concentrate on design as you suggest as it seems as if the design has less impact on the speed than the hosting.

You can close this ticket. Thank you.

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