Speed up your WordPress with SoftLayer

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems available—lots of websites and blogs use it. But one of its biggest problems is speed. As users install plugins and add blog content, site speed decreases over time. There are many factors contributing to this, from PHP execution time, database load, CPU load, memory, and of course, website traffic. This, in turn, can lead to revenue loss, traffic bounce, and decreased conversions and click-throughs.

To combat these issues, the team at Prime Strategy created the Kusanagi Ready Project. Kusanagi is a compilation of images of server-side configurations that sets up the perfect environment for any WordPress installation. The images come with an easy-to-setup GUI that allows users to select multiple configurations, carefully prescreened for an optimized WordPress experience. The customized image not only benefits WordPress installations but your general site as well. You can select between Nginx or Apache. You can take advantage of PHP5, PHP7, or Facebook’s ultra-fast HHVM PHP handlers and optionally add APCu or OPCache.

If that sounds interesting, you’ll be excited to learn that the team at Prime Strategy compiled this on the latest centOS, centOS 7! Some of the few reasons why you’d want to try out Kusanagi include increased caching, optimized PHP handlers, and custom configurations for both Apache and Nginx, offering a stable OS with long-term support.

In tests conducted by the Kusanagi team using the ab benchmark, the optimized WordPress loaded an impressive 1,000 percent faster than a regular installation. Now that is performance! What’s even better is that SoftLayer now offers Kusanagi images for our customers to order servers from. You can choose between monthly or hourly virtual servers and have blazing fast servers without wasting too much time at your fingertips.

The steps to deploy Kusanagi through SoftLayer can be found here.

-Stanley