We talked to Thomas Audunhus, Country Manager at Servebolt about all things WordPress and the key to scalability and performance in WordPress.
What does your organization do?
At Servebolt we are believe in a faster internet. We contribute to a faster internet by delivering amazingly fast hosting.
How do you help support WordPress enthusiasts and Professionals?
Sharing is important to us. We have WordPress professionals in our team that share their knowledge with the WordPress community. We are continuously researching how to speed up WordPress, WooCommerce and websites in general. A lot of what we do is shared and distributed as open source projects, or as publicly available articles.
What kind of client would be a good fit for you, and who wouldn’t?
We do hosting without cutting corners, by delivering extreme peak performance – without basing performance on full page caching. Our hosting is fast because of kick ass hardware, a self-maintained software stack designed for performance and security, and a world class R&D team that develops and optimises the stack to the bleeding edge in regards of performance. Not everyone needs that. But if you need high performance, scalability and a reliable environment that is amazingly fast, we’re the right fit.
How do your organization add value to the WordPress community?
For us the WordPress community with Meetups and WordCamps are essential to meeting the right people, and to plant our ideas, spread our vision and make our contributions available to the community.
The community is the corner stone of WordPress, and is essential for making better sites with WordPress, especially since many WordPress professionals work alone or in small teams. This is why we support the community as best we can with sponsorships of Meetups and WordCamps, and share our performance knowledge with the community.
Is there anything in WordPress that you would change, and why?
Thank you for asking!
We have passion for the low level stuff. Databases, table types and indexes, .htaccess files, compression, aggregation and optimisation. The key to scalability and performance relies on this, and there are a variety of things we work on.
When it comes to Core, for instance the wp_options table is lacking an index on the autoload column. For any sites with a big options table, adding the index will give a nice performance improvement.
ALTER TABLE `wp_options` ADD INDEX(`autoload`);
Also, why are transients stored and maintained in the options table? After all, the options table is the heart of WordPress, and constantly inserting and updating data there is an issue – especially at scale.
When it comes to performance, we also think it is important to move away from the idea that WordPress should do everything. For example providing a security framework or a complete cache system using PHP, largely based on .htaccess rules. PHP is slow, and the .htaccess system is an incredibly slow part of the web application stack, and should be completely avoided – if possible.
We are seeing a lot of very commonly used WordPress plugins that not use databases and indexes correctly. Databases are an advanced topic, so maybe the WordPress Community should organise a team that did reviews of how the most commonly used plugins use databases? We’d love to contribute to this.
Lastly i have to mention that more and more developers prioritize convenience over performance in the way they set up and develop WordPress, and the hosting environment. I believe that’s an issue that’s just going to keep growing, resulting in slower sites and less reliable sites. This is something we try to attack in any way we can, but I hope more developers and other hosting providers will embrace this issue and do something about it too.
Where will WordPress be in 2 years from now?
Servebolt believes that WordPress will be powering even larger E-commerce stores, especially as WooCommerce continues to professionalise and evolve. We also believe that WordPress will be increasingly used as a backend and CMS, and less just for the front-end application.
Is there anything else that you would like the WordCamp attendees know?
Our partner network is open for submissions. And we’ll love to chat with every WordPress professional, and agencies large and small about partnership. We want to make you build better websites!
We are very excited to to announce an new workshop during our contributor day.
