Offloading weak hosts using WordPress through a free CDN

Weak host there is only one reason: you don’t have enough money to invest tobuy a stronger host

. It’s normal, everyone has a difficult time, or you simply want to save as much as possible. If so, is there a way to maintain the website stability and reduce the load on the original hosting?

The answer is yes.

You have many ways to reduce the load on the host, so that it only has to use as few resources as possible. : Weak host here has relative meaning. The host costs about $ 20 / month for a website with 200,000 views / month may not be weak, but it is also a host for a page of 500,000 views. remarkably slow. Host price is not the main point here, if

If the host is not able to make sure the website runs smoothly, it is considered weak

.Note that this article is for those who use WordPress. Other CMS users may still find the information useful, but it applies best to WordPress.

General principles

: avoid downloading anything from your hosting. You can try one of the following.

Method 1. Using CloudFlare

• This tool probably many people know.
• Advantage:
• Can be used with any website, not just WordPress;
• Enhanced security; The free plan is decent quality;Basic setup is very simple, just change DNS to CloudFlare’s and turn on the yellow cloud and you’re done (of course the advanced settings will require you to learn more.
• CloudFlare pro package can be found here );Does not conflict with JS and CSS compression methods (such as using Autoptimize plugin), and

async or defer JS

• ;
• Defect:

Sometimes it fails to connect to the origin server;

High speed is not always available (especially when the cable breaks);

• Method 2: Use the plugin commonWP + Flying Images In essence, these 2 plugins help you get a free CDN for different types of static files: Plugins CommonWP use
• jsDelivr CDN for JS and CSS. It applies to any code that resides in WordPress.org plugins and themes. To use this plugin you must not combine and compress JS and CSS code with a plugin like Autoptimize, if you include it, it will not be pushed to the CDN. Installing the plugin is very simple, you just need to activate CommonWP and you’re done; Plugin Flying Images use ‘s CDN statically.io to CDN for photos. Not only CDN, its advantage is to help you compress images, distribute images below WebP format if necessary, in addition

lazy loading pictures

– which also has a lot of effects in reducing the load on hosting. This plugin is also simple to install, taking only a few minutes to complete;

• With these 2 plugins you have CDN for most of the static files on the website.
• Advantage:
• Both plugins are free;

Based on high quality, free and stable CDN platforms for a long time;

• Simple installation;
• Defect:
• statically.io is not an independent service, it relies on the contributions of other large CDN systems such as CloudFlare, CDN77, Fastly, BunnyCDN, CloudFront and has just been released recently, so stability takes time. further verification, at least for the moment it is stable;

CDN speed for images is not always high (but still acceptable); The image is not purgeable through the user interface (however often updating the image content is equivalent to changing the image URL so it shouldn’t be a big deal);PS: another way is also equivalent to method 2 but you only need to use one

plugin, it’s called Statically

. This is the official plugin of statically.io, you can CDN images, CSS & JS Method 3: Use JetPack plugin

JetPack plugin

• WordPress itself currently offers a free CDN service of decent quality.
• Advantage:

There’s a free CDN for both images and popular CSS and JS, in other words it’s about as powerful as commonWP + Flying Images;

• Maintain stability for a long time; [cập nhật: hiện tình trạng này đã bớt đi nhiều]Defect:
• Sometimes difficult to access from Vietnam (for non-technological reasons) [cập nhật: hiện nó có nhiều thay đổi giá trị, và tôi có quan điểm mới về JetPack, nó là plugin bạn nên dùng!];

The plugin is considered cumbersome, when there are many other features that you may not use

; Method 4: Use free or cheap static hosting The plugin to support this is WP2Staticor Simply Staticit will output your dynamic WordPress site as completely still. You can then upload this content to static hosting like Netlify, GitHub or

BunnyCDN

• (I would love to use this one). Advantage: Friend
• do not have to pay for hosting or if you have to rent, the price is also much cheaper than a regular host (with the same performance);Good speed, because it is a static file that does not take time to use
• MySQL database
• execute PHP;

Said to be more secure than using regular WordPress;

• Especially suitable for sites that don’t need to be updated for a long time, and/or sites with very high traffic;
• Defect:
• Only suitable for static pages;

Not suitable for those who often write and update content;

Installation is more difficult than other ways (you have to create a dynamic host for the development site and a static domain name for the official site for users);

• Method 5: Use LiteSpeed ​​server hosting in combination with BunnyCDN
• This approach has two advantages:

With hosting with LiteSpeed ​​server you can cache HTML and even though your original hosting is far away, the access speed in Vietnam is still very good, because LiteSpeed ​​will pull the HTML file of the website to very close to Vietnam, even to Vietnam. right at HN or SG (LiteSpeed ​​has QUIC cloud and they have PoP in VN).

BunnyCDN is cheap, high quality, has a very high cache hit ratio if you enable the perma-cache feature, so your original hosting is largely offloaded. And importantly, static files are loaded faster because they are closer to the user.

Personal choice

• Personally, I like the third way best (it’s very simple). Method four is also very potential if applied to the right website. And if you have a little extra cost (just less than 2$/month for CDN) then method 5 is perfect, it gives very smooth speed.
• Above I only talked about the basic part, but for deep optimization, you need to combine additional measures such as:
• Use a simple theme where appropriate (eg Astra, GeneratePress, Twenty Twenty); Remove redundant plugins, favor lightweight plugins; And so on (you can see more

How to speed up your WordPress website?

here);

Conclude

Basically, you can see that the support solutions for weak hosts are much the same as the ways to help speed up WordPress, the main difference is that in normal speeding we actively use the best tools in our range. (usually for a fee) to improve, while offloading the host focusing on the free and cheapest tools possible. Acceleration for weak hosts relies largely on free third-party CDN services. Luckily for us, such services are now more popular and stable. Of course, the downside is that, compared to traditional paid CDN services, most free CDN services can only host popular JS and CSS files (except CloudFlare). It is worth mentioning that free CDN services that host popular files have a slight advantage over traditional CDNs, which is because the files have the same URL, and many websites use it (e.g. jQuery), It is possible that one or more files that the page needs to load have already been downloaded

browser cache users, thereby helping to speed up the page even more. This really works, but why do I say it’s a small advantage, because the probability that some website you visited previously uses the same jQuery CDN source is not really high.Update: using a third party as a centralized source of popular resources like Google Fonts, jQuery coming soon will not provide the speedup on the cached aspect anymore. The reason is because

Chrome browser will start reloading the third-party resource even though it was previously loaded in another domain which is for security reasons.You can read the following article to know

pros and cons of using popular third-party code

• .Bonus: other ways to reduce load besides CDN
• Lazy loading of photos: although not as much recommended as before but if your site has a lot of images, and the visitors are mainly from desktops, using lazy load will reduce the load significantly without affecting the user experience much; Use simple themes: themes prioritize speed, with designs as simple as
• Astra

will be of great help to you; Remove plugins, especially heavy plugins: installing too many plugins and having heavy plugins will make a website on a weak host very fragile;Finally, if your host is so weak that even after applying many load reduction measures, it still cannot maintain stability, then this is the time for you to switch to another better hosting . I have a post