A lowered cost and more performant WordPress on Azure AppService

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.

Whether you’re shuffling a couple thousand visitors a day through an eCommerce shopping experience or attracting thousands of visitors to your content per day, your digital experience must be available and load fast to engage and wow your audiences. Our cloud-based solutions give your sites high availability, speed, scalability, and security, so you can press ahead with confidence.

 

WordPress hosted on Azure App Service is a fully managed Azure PaaS offering with built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching and scaling. It also supports virtual networks, and the ability to run in an isolated and dedicated App Service Environment. WordPress updates and patches, threat detection and blocking, and traffic encryption with free SSL certificates are part of what we offer to all of our customers.

There are several forms of WordPress running on Azure, but we recommend WordPress on Azure AppService  from the Azure Marketplace as your start point. Because these Marketplace offerings are optimized for Linux App Service, they are designed to be easy-to-install and come with up-to-date software packages, fine-tuned SKU sizes for both App Service & Azure MySQL DB and also with support from App Service team.

 

Architecture:

RadhikaB_1-1665377776832.png

 

Below are the out of the box configurations enabled with Marketplace WordPress on App Service image that led to give improved Request per second & response times.

 

Co-locate WordPress site and database

When you create a WordPress site using our Marketplace templates, we automatically select the database in the same region as your Web App. 

 

Caching

 By default, the WordPress on AppServcie is configured to use Redis server cache using the W3 Total Cache plugin enabled with Page Cache, Object Cache & Database Cache.  You can use other plugins of similar category or upgrade the current W3TotalCache to enterprise version.

 

Azure CDN

The Azure WordPress site is powered with fully managed CDN (Microsoft CDN)  to handle the static file content is capable of moving thousands of hits per day through our system. You can scale out the platform to manage the traffic spikes. 

 

Permalink format

Believe it or not, Permalink format can impact WordPress page load time. By default, the offering is configured with Day & Name type. We recommend not changing this.

 

Image Compression:

When you upload images to your site, it will automatically optimize and compress them for you using Smush It plugin.

 

Out of the box PHP configurations:

WordPress runs on PHP Server and the way PHP server configured plays a vital role in site performance. So there have been multiple parameters set to optimal level catering to WordPress needs.

 

Below is the guideline on the hosting plans one can choose to setup WordPress on Linux AppService based on your production workloads.  You may achieve the site response times in < a second for end user persona.

 

No. of Users

Requests per second

App Svc Hostin Plan

No.  AppService Instances

100

120

Standard(P1v2)

1

500

625

Production(P1v3)

1

1000

1200

Production(P1v3)

2

5000

6100

Production(P1v3)

4

10000

12050

Production(P1v3)

4

20000

21000

Production(P1v3)

6

 

Start your WordPress website today at Create WordPress on App Service - Microsoft Azure. Please comment on this post and let us know what you think. You can also provide your reviews at Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

 

If you are running your site either on Windows AppService or some other hosting provider and interested to migrate your workloads to WordPress on Linux App Service; here are the steps that you can follow: wordpress-linux-appservice/wordpress_migration_linux_appservices.md at main · Azure/wordpress-linux-appservice (github.com)

 

We will continue to deliver on our promise of empowering every WordPress developer to achieve more. If you have ideas about how we can do this better, you could post your ideas on Post idea · Community (azure.com) or you could email us at wordpressonazure@microsoft.com to start a conversation.

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