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Better WordPress performance through the use of Elasticsearch

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Recently I needed to improve the performance of a WooCommerce installation with multiple 10,000 products. On regular WordPress pages, performance was already good – the performance issues occurred on product archive pages. The post »What does it take to scale WooCommerce?« by Chris Lema contained the tip to use Elasticsearch, that can be integrated via ElasticPress that also supports WooCommerce. After that, WordPress uses Elasticsearch instead of the MySQL database for querying content.

Read and tested, and the result: a significant improvement of load time, now below one second ⚡

So if you are having issues with load speed on larger installations, where the database seems to be the bottleneck, try using Elasticsearch 🙂

Loading Gravatars and emoji fallbacks from your own server for WordPress sites

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You likely heard from it: GDPR is just around the corner. In this context, it is a good idea (it would have been a good idea before too, but one (at least me) did not think about it so much before…) to limit requests for external resources – and with that the sending of the user’s IP address to the other server – to the absolutely essential.

The emoji fallback for older browsers and Gravatar images are two often-active WordPress features that make requests to external servers. Now one could say, okay, then I disable them, but there are other ways. Here I present two plugins, which should be at least more harmless from a data protection point of view than the built-in solutions of WordPress (but, of course, I am not a lawyer).

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Autosuggest for WordPress search with ElasticPress on Apache

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The ElasticPress plugin allows connecting to an Elasticsearch server, for example, to show the results of WordPress search sorted by relevance. Besides that, the plugin comes with a few additional features, one of them Autosuggest. That displays results while the user is typing his search into the search field. This post shows you how to use that feature on Apache without having access to the httpd.conf file.

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SSH key and the »Windows Subsystem for Linux«

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With Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, you can use a Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10. With that, you can run many Linux commands, for example, ssh. This post shows you how to create an SSH key, which should be used on both, the Linux subsystem and Windows.

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