High Performance LAMP based Wordpress on DigitalOcean

Here are some tips and tricks I have found that make Wordpress run very fats on a $10 Digital Ocean droplet.

Setup Cloudflare via this article: Setup CloudFlare
Setup Redis via this article: Server Optimization#Redis
Setup your OpCache via this article: Server Optimization#OpCache

Run the following:

sudo a2enmod expires
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo a2enmod ext_filter

If you are using GIT on digitalocean, add this to your gitignore:

# Ignore paths that contain user-generated content.
/wp-content/ai1wm-backups
/wp-content/cache
/wp-content/uploads/
/wp-content/w3tc-config/
/wp-content/advanced-cache.php
/wp-content/db.php
/wp-content/object-cache.php

#htaccess for w3tc
.htaccess

Install the community version of W3 Total Cache
1. Go into your dashboard then Performance.
2. Under General do the following:
```
Page Cache – ENABLE
Minify – DISABLE
Opcode Cache - set to Zend OpCache
Database Cache – ENABLE (set to disk)
Object Cache – ENABLE (set to Redis)
Browser Cache – ENABLE
CDN – DISABLE
Reverse Proxy – DISABLE
Monitoring – NO ACTION
Debug – DISABLED
```
3. Under Page Cache do the following:
```
Cache posts page = CHECKED
Don't cache front page = NOT CHECKED
Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments = CHECKED
Cache SSL (https) requests = CHECKED
Cache URIs with query string variables = NOT CHECKED
Cache 404 (not found) pages = NOT CHECKED
Don't cache pages for logged in users = CHECKED
Don't cache pages for following user roles = NOT CHECKED
```
  1. Scroll Down to Cache Preload
    1. Check Automatically prime the page cache && Preload the post cache upon publish events
4. Under Browser Cache, do the following:
  1. Check everything in General BUT:
    1. Set W3 Total Cache header
    2. Prevent caching of objects after settings change
    3. Do not process 404 errors for static objects with WordPress
    4. Rewrite URL structure of objects
5. Go to Extensions, do the following:
  1. Deactivate everything but CloudFlare & Yoast (if using Yoast, which you shoud!)
  2. Click on settings on Cloudflare
    1. Enter your API key and all your settings from Cloudflare should come over.
      1. Make sure you have minify setup (which was in the other wiki on Cloudflare)

On the server, add this to your .htaccess

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=290304000, public"
</FilesMatch>

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
    ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>

Install Scripts to Footer plugin
1. Go to Settings → Scripts to Footer
  1. Check Keep jQuery in the Header

Add this to your functions.php

/**
 * Adds async tag to JQuery
 */
function add_async_attribute($tag, $handle) {
  // add script handles to the array below
  $scripts_to_defer = array('jquery-core','jquery-migrate');

  foreach($scripts_to_defer as $defer_script) {
    if ($handle == $defer_script) {
      return str_replace(' src', ' async src', $tag);
    }
  }
  return $tag;
}
add_filter('script_loader_tag', 'add_async_attribute', 10, 2);

Add the Autoptimize plugin
1. Go to Settings → Autoptimize
2. Check Optimize CSS Code?
  1. hit the show advanced settings at the top
  2. Uncheck everything except Inline all CSS?
  3. Save Changes and Empty Cache