How is that different from what the article documents?

Out of curiosity do you know why Cloudflare has blocked you? Browser integrity check, IP reputation, etc? I'm trying to have more lax settings for my static website, and would love to make sure it's as accessible as possible.

I have also been blocked. We are probably in a country where the author has decided to block us on CloudFlare.

And pagespeed score reflects that. It does not matter if it’s in ram, most of the pages/load will be on the CDN and caching anyways.

Servers put the most requested into RAM also.

The code contains database calls that have to run, reads and writes. Processors are sophisticated, but if they (or rather, they and the os) were that smart, WordPress installations would be a lot faster by default.

And maybe that's not surprising, think about it: the typical server does a lot of other things additionally to serving one specific WordPress site.

A performance problem I’ve run into with small websites like this one is many caching systems are tuned for bigger companies or hotter programs, and basically every load ends up an “exceptional” cold start case. VMs wake up, Cloudflare actually only keeps your data one place, there’s no sane HTTP caching value, and, yeah, files are read from disk. Worse, it’s easy to miss during testing by loading things more frequently. I’m sure there are filesystem or server parameters to tweak, but I do think small websites that want great performance should be, somewhere somehow, managing caching manually.

Depends on the amount of data/assets. With all the AI bots its easy for (default) caches to be undersized since sites no longer have most frequently accessed URLs, every URL (and query param combo) ends up being frequently accessed.

While WP is not my first choice, it's also not good to give binary answers as the only factual options.

There will be lots strapi and astro or whatever preference/interpretation we have personally can't do.

WP has corporate momentum/network effect though, in the same way that Jira, Jenkins, and Java (among other things) have.

For a long time now WP no longer just caters to the hacker "Code is Poetry" crowd---and, of course, even less so nowadays with the controversies WP has embroiled itself with. The people who are inclined to choose WP by default do so because of the wealth of plugins available to them, be that Shopify integration or fine-grained tracking of a marketing campaign. They would wonder why someone would ever prefer something "headless". They think static websites are the dinosaurs the Y2K comet wiped out.

Sure we can argue about whether WP is the "best solution" but WP is definitely the solution that works acceptably out-of-the-box. Your CMS of choice probably has a bunch of out-of-the-box solutions for common concerns as well but I doubt that it can handle the edge cases that Head of Marketing will inevitably introduce with their ol' reliable set of integrated services. Shopify + Google Analytics + Salesforce + Airtable[1] always worked for them with WP but suddenly this allegedly-better "headless" CMS is throwing all sorts of dumb errors.

And if a plugin is not available, there is no shortage of WP/PHP developers who can make one at a reasonable price. In contrast, I'm sorry, but honestly your comment is the first time I've heard about Strapi and Astro.

I'm not saying I like the status quo but if someone asks me for a WP site, I give them a hardened EC2 box with WP over Apache/NGINX. Then I return to frying bigger fish.

[1] Just an example.

Yeah I skimmed it and it all read like when I ask ChatGPT to go wild and be “fun”.

The bigger tell is that half the article is unnecessary space-filling hyperbole...

The overwhelming majority of the speed-up here would come from the database, which is trivially easy to run on tmpfs. When using Docker, it's literally a one-liner! For example:

docker run -d --tmpfs /var/lib/mysql -p 127.0.0.1::3306/tcp -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=[password] mariadb:11.8

Of course you need a really good backup story for this to be a reasonable choice.

"Let’s break down the tune. This is not a just WordPress install. This is a brass-knuckle brawl between performance and everything that dares to slow it down."

Shoemakers kids have holes in their shoes. In my heyday of freelance work my website was always the last priority. The freelance work I was doing kept me so busy I had no time to spit shine my own site.

This is a Wordpress site, pagespeed is 96 https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-www-storwell-com/wn...

While the site is using a CDN (Cloudflare), pages are not cached ("cf-cache-status: DYNAMIC"). Sometimes this actually makes the site slower to load as we're going <-> cloudflare <-> server instead of directly to the server.

I can recommend the WP Super Cache plugin[0] - it can generate pre-gzipped static sites and then you can setup your webserver[1] to prefer those, or non-compressed static files and only when not in cache actually bother passing down the request into PHP.

Gives me an 97 and 88 respectively[2] on that pagespeed tool.

[0] https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/

[1] https://github.com/simonrupf/docker-php-wp/blob/master/etc/n...

[2] https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-bobcat-dssr-ch/0ziq... / https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-simon-rupf-net/auk5...

Never heard of pagespeed before (yeah, lucky 10k etc, but also I'm just not a web dev) and this pointed up some huge easy wins on my image heavy homelab site, so thanks for that (setting `Cache-control` at all, and forcing `img loading="lazy"`.) To shortcut some obvious followups: (a) the pagespeed engine is called "lighthouse" and it's on github (Apache licensed)(b) it's also built in to Chrome DevTools (inspect) but for me it was all the way over on the » section of the toolbar. So you can run it locally on a private/staging site. again, thanks!

I think they're saying that the metadata checks on cached files still have to go to disk. I would be surprised if that was consistently true, but I can't make any other sense out of it.

I have also been blocked. We are probably in a country where the author has decided to block us on CloudFlare.