Offsite assets WordPress plugin

There comes a point in the life of every website when the amount of traffic surpasses the power of the poor little web-server.

Thankfully there are ways of delaying the move to a larger, more powerful but ultimately more expensive server. A few of which are invaluable for websites that have infrequent surges of traffic.

Step one - cache, cache and cache again.

WordPress is, quite frankly, resource hungry. Whilst a lot of work has gone into streamlining the source code and making the database queries more efficient, let’s be honest - a standard install on a small (or shared) server isn’t going to survive thousands of visits a day.

Thankfully there is a plugin specifically developed to help you out. WP Super Cache was written by Donncha O Caoimh and simply generates a text file containing the HTML of your site and serves that to your visitors rather than creating the page content for every visit.

Obviously it is a lot more complicated than that behind the scenes, but once you have it installed and running, you shouldn’t even notice it - other than an increase in the speed of your page loads.

Step two - split the workload.

Your web server does a lot of work. As well as initially building the HTML for your web page and sending it to the visitor, it also has to send all the small bits and pieces that make up the design and functionality of your web site to their browser.

It, therefore, makes sense that if you take away some of the simpler (but more bandwidth heavy) work of your web server, then your sites performance will be improved.

This is where the upcoming Offsite assets plugin comes in. By moving your themes stylesheet, images and javascript to other servers, you can leave your main web server to the job of building and outputting the sites basic HTML. When combined with the WP Super Cache plugin above, your main web server will only be sending a text HTML file to your visitors, whilst another server sends all of the graphics.

An extra server?

Though you could go to the expense of getting another server solely to handle your theme files, there are thankfully a few services that will allow you to store and serve files to your visitors whilst only paying for the amount of space and bandwidth you use.

Amazon S3 (and it’s CDN service called Cloudfront) are used by some of the largest websites out there, and are more than capable of handling whatever traffic your site can throw at them, for surprisingly little cost.

Is it complicated?

Absolutely not, but then I would say that wouldn’t I? Once you have an extra server, or have set up your Amazon S3 (or alternative) account, simply upload your theme (or themes) into a “themes” folder on that server. After making sure that the files are publicly readable, upload the Offsite Assets plugin to your WordPress plugin directory and activate it.

Finally, tell the plugin where your theme files are now located - have a look at the video below for an example.

The Offsite Assets plugin will be available very soon, if you would like to help beta test it, then leave a comment below and send me a tweet.