Optimizing Performance for WordPress on High-Spec VPS — Seeking Advice - Enhance Control Panel

Optimizing Performance for WordPress on High-Spec VPS — Seeking Advice

jb007

I currently have two VPS setups, Managed vs Unmanaged, and am trying to optimize performance for a WordPress site.

Here are the details:

Managed VPS:
Ubuntu 22.04 with OpenLiteSpeed
Specs: 8 vCPU (EPYC), 32 GB RAM, 400 GB NVMe
Control Panel: Branded control panel, using LiteSpeed cache plugin
Cloudflare DNS

Performance Metrics (via PageSpeed Insights):
First Contentful Paint: 0.3s
Largest Contentful Paint: 0.5s
Speed Index: 0.6s

Load Time (Pingdom): 1.28s,
Performance Grade: 79

Unmanaged VPS:
Ubuntu 22.04 with LiteSpeed Web Server
Specs: 12 CPU (EPYC), 36 GB RAM, 250 GB NVMe
Control Panel: Enhance, with LiteSpeed Web Server
Cloudflare DNS

Performance Metrics (via PageSpeed Insights):
First Contentful Paint: 0.5s
Largest Contentful Paint: 0.6s
Speed Index: 0.7s

Load Time (Pingdom): 1.10s
Performance Grade: 95

I'm considering whether I should focus on tuning server settings manually on the unmanaged VPS to potentially enhance performance further. Given the high specifications of both servers, is manual tuning typically necessary, or are there automatic configurations that already optimize performance? Also, are there particular settings or tweaks in the server environment that are recommended for a WordPress site of this scale via Enhance?

Any insights or experiences with similar setups would be greatly appreciated!

In regards to overall cost, the managed VPS is about 60% cheaper (something to keep in mind).

Again, this is all for just 1 domain.

jb007

Also, just to add:

@Adam has confirmed that Enhance automatically configures LiteSpeed Web Server; which is amazing!

FYI - There are no solid videos and/or tutorials on properly configuring LSWS.

ivansalloum

You could only tune some kernel parameters but I don’t see that much difference. The default kernel settings are always perfect.

Speed depends on how well your WP site is made plus your caching configuration. If you configure CF page caching properly, you will get the best TTFB and page speed results. I‘m talking about a non-dynamic site.

Andrei

Optimising server settings may not have a significant impact on performance in terms of loading time, but it plays a role in scalability.

Most people get website performance wrong because they think it's about the server. 99% of the time, it's about the website, not the server. Optimising the website will give you better scores.

You can read about WordPress performance here - https://simplenet.io/make-wordpress-faster/

In my experience, the main problems are database issues (wp_options and wp_postmeta), non-cacheable requests made by bad plugins, and too much Javascript.

JohnB

Others have good points. I'd add that If these servers are in different datacenters / providers / locations, the speedtest results will differ. Notice pingdom thinks Enhance is faster which could indicate their server is closer or has an optimized route.

Also you can run PageSpeed Insights twice on the same exact site with no changes and get different results so keep that in mind. You can run the test directly from your browser with nothing else running and get more consistent results. Google seems to have overloaded test nodes.

twest

Optimizing the webserver is only one part. You should also optimize your db. I would say optimizing the DB is critical, especially if using DB based websites like WordPress. Theres less things that need tweaked with litespeed, but you should still go in the ls config panel and customize everything - like by default there is no LS cache setup to do server side caching, which is a big performance improvement for LS servers (you can run your cached pages on ram). The LS config in enhance is extremely basic, most things are defaults. The OLS config is probably what Adam meant by being optimized by enhance, you can't change the OLS config at the moment.

ivansalloum

twest What do you do to optimize MariaDB/MySQL?

adil

twest go in the ls config panel

When using LiteSpeed on enhance, we can access the config panel ? or its the same as OpenLiteSpeed and the config wipe out by enhance?

twest

ivansalloum search the forum, I posted a guide with extensive info before, lots of good info in that thread.

MediaServe

adil LiteSpeed config is persistent while OpenLiteSpeed is not. Seems to be a different format between the two, commercial being XML while OLS config is raw text.

https://openlitespeed.org/kb/ols-configuration-examples/