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How to use Redis to speed up your slow WordPress website

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Q:

Our WordPress website is slow, and we’ve been told that implementing caching in WordPress, specifically Redis, might be the answer to our problem. Can you explain how to use Redis for speeding up a WordPress website?

Issue

The client has heard about using Redis as an optimization measure in order improve their sluggish-performing WordPress site. They need more information on it before deciding whether or not they should implement this solution.

How to use Redis to speed up your slow WordPress website

Redis is an in-memory data structure store and can be used as a cache or for other purposes. When used as a caching mechanism with WordPress, Redis can dramatically improve response times. By offloading some of the data from the database server to Redis and keeping that data in memory instead.

Using Redis to speed up your website requires enabling it on both your webserver and on your WordPress installation. If your organization’s slow WordPress website is a burden, read on for more ideas on improving the performance of your WordPress website.

Enabling Redis on your server

Let’s get started by going ahead and enabling and configuring Redis on a web server. Install the package. A number of hosting providers also offer managed solutions for configuring and running Redis, making it easy to get up and running quickly.

The specifics of installing Redis depends so highly on your server configuration, OS, and already installed packages, that finding a guide for your specific needs is best.

Once installed, configure any settings that are necessary (such as memory limits) and start the service.

Enabling Redis in WordPress

It’s easy to enable Redis to work with WordPress. There are a number of caching plugins that you can use to enable and configure Redis in WordPress, including:

These plugins allow you to easily configure Redis as your object cache, and some also support page caching.

Once configured and enabled these plugins will automatically handle writing to the Redis server, so all you need is a properly configured server.

Impact of Redis on WordPress Performance

Once Redis is enabled, you should see improved performance in page loading times, especially if the server is under heavy load. Redis can also dramatically improve your database query performance by caching data that needs to be accessed frequently.

Let’s remember, improving WordPress site speed and performance is often a result of numerous efforts, and implementing a cache in WordPress, be it Redis, or another option, is only one way of improving your site’s speed.

There are a lot of other steps you can take to improve your site’s performance, including optimizing images, enabling browser caching, minifying files and more.

Redis enables even faster performance for almost any website. We find Redis makes huge improvements for any query-intensive WordPress website.

The goal should be taken in a holistic approach with multiple steps that can together help achieve an overall better performance.

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