HHVM can really speed up your PHP-based web site. Most reports are somewhere in the range of 2–4x faster. Unfortunately, HHVM isn’t very stable and will suddenly die, just of the blue, from time to another. Fortunately, if you’re running Nginx it’s really easy to set up PHP-FPM as a fallback.
Fail2ban works by filtering a log file with a regular expression triggering a ban action if the condition is met. After a preset time, it will trigger an unban action. Without much effort, we can have WordPress log all authentication events and have fail2ban react on them.
If your fail2ban is on a host behind a Rackspace Cloud LoadBalancer, you’ll want to block the offending IP addresses directly in your LoadBalancer. If your LB is acting as a reverse proxy, you’ll HAVE to block in the LB, but it is also nice to protect all other nodes behind the LB and offload the lifting.
Since version 3.9, WordPress have been 100% compatible with HHVM and I have begun replacing PHP with it on a few of my servers to experiment.
Any organization where multiple developers cooperate on a regular basis needs some guidelines to assure optimal quality of the end result. Most of these rules applies to freelancers as well.
OK, so you might have been at a WordCamp listening to talks or reading a few blog posts and you get that you should really get your WordPress site speed optimized. Starting all over isn’t either tempting nor something you have the time for. Don’t despair, you’ll get a long way by installing 5 plugins.
Now that you have secured Nginx with HTTPS and enabled SPDY enabled HTTP/2, it’s time to improve both the security and the performance of the server.
Recently, I’ve done some WordPress load optimization with Thomas Bensmann (read his post « Full score on Google PageSpeed, Pingdom and GTMetrix») and to achieve full effect, you do have to load the Google Analytics tracking script, ga.js, from your own server.
When you get into page loading optimization, you will quickly find these «must-dos»: Combine your CSS and JavaScript files (respectively), minimize your CSS and JavaScript, load CSS before JS, load JS in body footer and then even some. Without much effort, we can make WordPress do all of this automatically.
Gravity Forms is not only THE way to create and manage forms in WordPress, but is also pretty awesome when it comes to extensibility and flexibility. However, as most software, it has its issues. One of those is how it outputs some of the JavaScript, which in certain cases will break your site. This is how to fix it.