Brent Simmons is still frustrated because so many sites Daring Fireball links to are inaccessible because of the massive amount of traffic it brings. Making your Wordpress site Fireball-proof is not hard and anyone who can’t find the minimal amount of time to do it probably shouldn’t be self-hosting in the first place.
Prep Time / Ready Time
10 minutes / 20 minutes
Servings
Thousands upon thousands of happy visitors who can actually read your site rather than your clever 503 error page.
Ingredients
- 1 Wordpress installation
- 1 copy of W3 Total Cache
Directions
- In your Wordpress Dashboard, click “Add New” under plugins.
- Search for W3 Total Cache.
- Click Install.
- Configure W3 Total Cache to enable page caching at a minimum. Enable database caching and minify for further performance.
- Additional garnish: Sign up for Amazon S3 and set it as your CDN provider in W3 Total Cache. W3 will now rewrite your image and video URLs to point to S3 rather than your web server, which cuts down on load even more.
Easy Bake Instructions
If you can’t handle the installation of the plugins yourself or just don’t want to, sign up for Wordpress.com or WPEngine, my preferred Wordpress host. My site doesn’t even blink when Fireballed these days.