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Now that you have secured [Nginx with HTTPS](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/securing-nginx-ssl) and [enabled SPDY](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/enabling-spdy-nginx) [enabled HTTP/2](https://www.bjornjohansen.com/enable-http2-on-nginx), 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](https://bensmann.no/full-score-google-pagespeed-pingdom-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.
There are now several years since WordPress was considered a blog platform only. Today, it's a full blown CMS and perfectly capable of powering corporate web sites. Here I provide you with 5 non-technical reasons why WordPress is well fit for a corporate CMS.
SPDY is this new, cool, fast protocol created by Google that "replaces" HTTP (the first draft of HTTP 2.0 is using SPDY as the working base). It is [supported in all the major browsers](http://caniuse.com/spdy "Compatibility table for support of SPDY networking protocol in desktop and mobile browsers.") – yes, even Internet Explorer – with the exception of Apple's Safari.
Adding a certificate and using the HTTPS protocol is a good improvement to the security in the communication between the browser and the server, and should be in place on all sites that have a user login. Contrary to what many (older) guides say, it doesn't add much load on your server and is fairy easy and cheap to set up right.
I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Unfortunately, the Nginx versions tend to be quite the bit behind the current release. So how do you get an updated, current version of without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? Luckily, the Nginx team have their own Ubuntu apt repository so it’s easy to keep current with the latest version of Nginx.
I always run the latest LTS version of Ubuntu on all my servers. Currently the latest LTS is 14.04 which comes with PHP version 5.5, but as of November 2014, the latest stable version is 5.6. So how do you get an updated, current version of PHP without resorting to having to maintain the packages yourself? The answer is in PPA.
You have finished that WordPress site, and want to deploy it – move it from your test server to the production server where it goes live. But how? WordPress have a famous 5-minute-install, but there is no 5-minute-go-live-script\*. I'll show you how in these 5 easy-to-follow steps.