Going cloud without overspending
My first WordCamp in Bucharest, and my first talk about speed. The problem was the same one I still see today: slow sites, low numbers in analytics, and owners who don’t know why.
My answer in 2017 was the cloud, used carefully.
Start small
You don’t need to move everything at once. Amazon’s free tier covers a lot for a small site, and the biggest win usually comes from moving just your media.
S3 and CloudFront
Store images and files in S3, then serve them through CloudFront, Amazon’s CDN. Visitors get files from a server near them instead of from your one host. A plugin like WP Offload S3 handles the upload, and W3 Total Cache can point your CSS and JavaScript at the CDN too.
A proper DNS
Your domain registrar’s DNS is often slow. Route 53, or any cloud DNS, answers from servers around the world. It is a small change most people never think about.
Watch for mixed content
The most common problem after moving to a CDN is mixed content: pages on HTTPS loading files over HTTP. Use your own subdomain for the CDN with a proper certificate, and fix old URLs in the database.
Use your budget on the services that make the biggest difference, not on everything the cloud offers.
