ThemeRex is one of the best WordPress theme providers for ecommerce websites. When running an ecommerce store using WordPress as CMS, speed is the most important factor for making your store a successful one.
In fact, this can be a negative gesture for your potential visitors to make purchase from your store. Not only this, slow loading time is also a blockage in ranking higher in search engine result page (SERP), since Google ranks sites that are loaded in less than 2 seconds.
There are many factors that collectively play a vital role in speeding up a WordPress site. We are going to cover the most essential and the very first step is:
«Choose WordPress Hosting Wisely!»
In this regard, we have decided to guide our customers in choosing the best WordPress hosting provider for a speedy website. We have noticed, most of our customers are using different plans from a number of hosting providers claiming the fastest WordPress hosting in the industry. You might be disappointed with the word “FASTEST” unless you tried it by yourself.
Indeed, our themes are very lightweight and highly-optimized to fit for any WordPress website. But, for more better performance your hosting server should be capable enough to easily handle a number of requests.
You might be aware of the term cloud hosting that is growing rapidly in the web hosting industry due to its high-performance, reliability, auto-scalability and security.
Considering the pros of cloud hosting, we at ThemeRex, decided to test the performance of our WordPress themes and plugins on a cloud hosting provider. There are a number of providers like Google Compute Engine, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Vultr etc. It was a difficult decision to filter out which one should we use to perform test.
To launch a server on cloud infrastructure provider, you need to have an advanced technical knowledge to create and manage your server or need to hire a high-paid SysAdmin. To overcome these technicalities, there are a number of hosting providers that provides managed hosting solutions. Some of them manage both, server and WordPress, while others manage servers only.
In our today’s guide, we have chosen the fastest WordPress hosting that is Cloudways, which handles all your server side headaches, and is a bit cheaper than other managed hosting providers like WPEngine, Kinsta, etc. And we have chosen one of our most popular themes Jacqueline to run this test.
Why Choose Cloudways?
You might be thinking, why we have chosen Cloudways to conduct our tests. Well, there is a very simple reason, they are PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider, they act like a bridge between you and your server with top infrastructure cloud providers. They provide all top-notch cloud infrastructures like GCE, AWS, DO, Vultr and KYUP (a container-based hosting) which will help us in conducting test. Another reason is, they provide staging URLs to develop and test a WordPress site before making it live.
Testing Environment
To be very fair in conducting our tests, we have created a testing environment on all infrastructure providers including dummy data and a number of required plugins installed.
Dummy Data
We have imported dummy data for testing environment, so our staging site may look like a real one.
Installed and Enabled Plugins
Below are the few required plugins that make our themes more better. All of them are installed and activated on our testing environment.
Note: In addition, we have also installed and activated W3TC plugin.
Okay, let’s test our site on different infrastructure providers and compare their performance.
Amazon Web Services
- 1.75GB Server (California)
- PHP 7 & MySQL 5.6
- Tested from California (Pingdom)
- WordPress 4.7.x
- Jacqueline (Theme)
- Varnish Enabled
- Dummy data and above mentioned plugins installed
DigitalOcean
- 1GB Server (San Francisco)
- PHP 7 & MySQL 5.6
- Tested from California (Pingdom)
- WordPress 4.7.x
- Jacqueline (Theme)
- Varnish Enabled
- Dummy data and above mentioned plugins installed
Vultr
- 1GB Server (Silicon Valley)
- PHP 7 & MySQL 5.6
- Tested from California (Pingdom)
- WordPress 4.7.x
- Jacqueline (Theme)
- Varnish Enabled
- Dummy data and above mentioned plugins installed
Google Compute Engine
- 1.70GB Server (Oregon)
- PHP 7 & MySQL 5.6
- Tested from California (Pingdom)
- WordPress 4.7.x
- Jacqueline (Theme)
- Varnish Enabled
- Dummy data and above mentioned plugins installed
KYUP (Container-Based)
- 1GB Server (Chicago)
- PHP 7 & MySQL 5.6
- Tested from California (Pingdom)
- WordPress 4.7.x
- Jacqueline (Theme)
- Varnish Enabled
- Dummy data and above mentioned plugins installed
Worried About Performance Grade?
Well, there is nothing to be worried about the performance grade on all cloud providers. Below are the factors that defines the performance grade. You can see, Pingdom is suggesting to combine external resources. You can fix them by using a number of methods and performance grade will be increased.
The page size and number of requests are bit high due to the load we have enforced on each server. It is always suggested to keep page size less than 1MB and reduce number of requests, as they are the factors that defines page load time.
Considering the above mentioned page size and number of requests, respective servers are optimized enough to tackle the testing environment, and loaded the site in less than 1.25 seconds.
Final Thoughts
In today’s guide, we have tested different cloud infrastructure providers using our Jacqueline theme and all required plugins. Cloudways performed very well in high-load scenario. There are a number of other ways to speed up a WordPress site while hosting on Cloudways.
Now if liked our Jacqueline WordPress Theme don’t hesitate to buy it here. And get $20 discount on Cloudways hosting using this promocode THEMEREX20.
Anyone of you tried their service running any of our theme? Feel free to share your experience in comments section below.