Slides from my Lightning Talk at WordCamp US in Philadelphia on Dec 4th 2015. Five must-have tools (and plenty of REAL TALK) for delivering high performance WordPress websites.

1. Website Performance
Real Talk

2. Hi, I’m Josh
@outlandishjosh — josh@pantheon.io

3. Pantheon isn’t a “Host”
(we’re a Website Management Platform)

4. But, we do provide several
metric tons of hosting.
(billions of pageviews a month)

5. Data centers took 2% of US power in 2012.
“Power, Pollution and the Internet,”
New York Times, 2012

6. “I’ve seen things you people
wouldn’t believe.”

8. Theme belt

9. Theme belt
Login gasket

10. Login gasket
Plugin rotors
Theme belt

11. Login gasket
Plugin rotors
Theme belt
Emergency
overdrive valve

12. Top Speed: 125 mph

13. Top Speed: 25,000 mph

14. REAL TALK: the keys to
breakthrough performance
aren’t* inside WordPress
* usually - we’ll talk about this again

15. source: http://talks.php.net/fluent15#/wpbench

16. Must Have #1: use a recent
version of PHP

17. REAL TALK: It’s caches all
the way down
If you care about performance, you care about
caching in all it’s many manifestations.

18. OpCode Cache
C.R.E.A.M

19. REAL TALK: A vanilla WordPress
homepage needs billions of CPU cycles.
Must Have #1.5: If you aren’t using
OpCache, you are wasting your life.

20. Object Cache
C.R.E.A.M

21. REAL TALK: WordPress is the smartest
(and slowest) thing in your stack.
Must Have #3: use a persistent object
cache to prevent WordPress busywork

22. C.R.E.A.M
Page Cache

23. REAL TALK:
200x performance is... a lot
Must have #3: Reverse-
Proxy Cache

24. REAL TALK: The DB is the
ultimate bottleneck

25. Must have #4: If you aren’t
using InnoDB and SSD disks,
you are wasting your life.

26. REAL TALK: you can’t
throw hardware at a
performance problem and
expect it to stay fixed.

27. Must Have #5
You don’t need
an Einstein, but
you do need an
expert.

28. REAL TALK: performance is
hard. It takes constant
improvement to be great.
Good luck!