Reducing Server Resources: Improve Costs, SEO, Conversions & UX

Michael Jones - Holidaypoint.com.au

14 years of search engine marketing experience,

worked with many large organisations in Australia

(both in-house and agency side), in a broad range

of industries including: shopping, insurance,

classified and service websites.

Specialising in SEO, but have experience in:

- SEM - Analytics - Social

- Local - Reputation Management

- Email Marketing

A network of 11 travel websites; managing everything from:

- Search Engine Optimisation - Social Media Marketing

- Video & Image Creation - Content Editing

- Web Programming - Website Building

- Affiliate Marketing - AdSense

- Web Analytics - Keyword Research

Web Search Strategist

Just an ordinary day in Cpanel

Not Really!During my routine inspection of my Cpanel interface, I

noticed that my CPU usage and account executions were

significantly higher than normal and were exceeding the

usage limits. From past experience – this usually leads to

trouble…

Surely I was already safe?

Having road-tested a lot of Wordpress security plugins in the

past, I thought I was pretty safe from potential hackers,

harvesters and spamming; especially with the built in

features of Wordfence…

http://www.wordfence.com/


Wordfence – IP blocking

I was blocking whole countries from accessing my websites,

along with individual IPs that have tried accessing my admin

panel and those who were obviously not human visitors

(crawling my website too quickly, but not a search engine)



Wordfence – FirewallAdditional to this, there is a built-in firewall that automatically

blocks IPs based on certain triggers (accessing the site too

quickly, using a username that doesn’t exist, etc)



Redirections – 404 Logs

I also utilise a plugin that logs all 404 errors and easily lets

me implement 301 redirects to stop users from trying to

access those files in the future. I also block their IPs if they

apparent to be sniffing for file vulnerabilities.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

So what did I do about it?

Ask for help

Since I have had similar issues in the past, I jumped into a

live chat session with my Web Host, who then told me to

launch a support ticket.

<<< ME

THEM >>>

Research admin-ajax.php

I just did a quick Google search and found out what this file

is used for, ways I could minimise the usage, and possible

effects of changing how it works.

Research wp-cron.php

Similar to the previous, I researched what this file is and

what it does. The default configuration of wp-cron is used to

trigger background / maintenance tasks in the background

every time a page is loaded. If you have a pretty basic

website, this really isn’t required, so I limited how often cron-

jobs are processed.

Some of my themes use Timthumb

Timthumb is a resource heavy script that automatically

compresses and resizes images on the fly.

Since it is somewhat old technology and has been a known

security vulnerability in the past - it’s no longer updated /

supported, I have a started to change themes (that’s another

story altogether), but I have also blocked external websites

from triggering the script and hotlinking images.

Awstats – Visiting CountriesSince Google Analytics only monitors pages / users that

trigger the tracking code, it is advised to look into Awstats

instead (this looks at all files on your website).

For an AU based website that normally receives nearly all

traffic from Australia, the stats below looked worrying –

especially the Pages to Hits Ratio.

Awstats – Requested Files

Similar to the list of files provided by the hosting company, I

was also able to view the most requested file on a site basis.

You can see here that xmlrpc.php has been requested an

abnormally high number of times.

Awstats – Visiting IP addresses

Similar to the country report, you can also review the most

active IP addresses. Not only can we see that the ratio

between Pages and Hits is way to low, but an IP trace

shows they are from suspicious countries outside of my

targeted audience.

IP Deny ManagerWith the IP addresses in hand, I used the IP Deny Manager

tool to start blocking these suspicious IPs form accessing

my website. The good thing about this is that it applies the

blocks across all your websites at once.

I also added additional countries to Wordfence.

Surely that was enough?

An email I get at 3am in the morning

So lets just say it was not very fun waking up to this –

especially since everything was fixed… that and I already

flagged potential issues that I was looking into.

The major issue:

Current Suggested

Not only were the suggested upgrades I needed are overkill

for what I need, but the closest hosting upgrade is more than

4 times the price.

What I responded with:

ME >>>

<<< THEM

So they unblocked my website, but

I pretty much 24 hours to turn

things around or I would be

blocked again.

Time to declare war!

Block and block some moreUsing a combination of Awstats & the IP Deny Manager, I

reviewed the list of recently visited IP addresses and further

blocked anything suspicious.

Time to step up my game!

http://spyderspanker.com/


Spyder Spanker - Settings Panel

Blacklist Whitelist

IP BlockingCountry Blocking



Spyder Spanker – Project Honeypot

If a visitor doesn’t get matched to your whitelist or

blacklist, their IP is submitted to Project Honeypot

where they are matched

against an up to the minute

list of comment spammers,

harvesters, hackers and

suspicious IPs.



EWWW Image Optimiser

A great free and easy to use Wordpress Plugin that

bulk optimises your existing images files and new

optimises new images on the fly.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ewww-image-optimizer/

Caching Plugins

So even though I was using the built-in

mod_pagespeed apache module provided by my

webhost, there was several things that I wasn’t able

to implement and the settings were quite basic… so

I went looking around.

https://www.w3-edge.com/products/w3-total-cache/


W3 Total Cache

After road-testing several plugins by looking at their

configuration options, their functionality, pagespeed

scores and page loading times, I settled on W3

Total Cache for their manual control of Javascript

minifying and deferring and cache settings.

Here are some of the key benefits of these plugins:



W3 Total Cache: Setting Examples

Manual

control of

Javascript

Delivery

CDN

Support for

popular

providers

Full control

on the file

types to

cache / CDN

deliverhttps://www.w3-edge.com/products/w3-total-cache/


CDN Delivery

“A content delivery network (CDN) is an

interconnected system of cache servers that use

geographical proximity as a criteria for delivering

web content.

Why use a CDN?

https://www.keycdn.com/

https://www.keycdn.com/

Which CDN provider to use?

Apart from reading a lot of online reviews and

endorsements, I also used a few calculators that would

compare pricing on monthly bandwidth and traffic origin.

Some providers have the nerve to charge extra for different countries and also

will look to charge you a flat fee regardless of how much data you use. http://www.cdncalc.com/

http://www.cdncalc.com/

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2014/04/09/web-page-speed-affect-conversions-infographic/

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2014/04/09/web-page-speed-affect-conversions-infographic/

After all that, what did I see?

BEFORE AFTER

My server resources normalised

I got a response back from my web host that

server resources have fell back to normal rates

and that the ticket has been closed.

If anything, these are the lowest they have

been in a long time, which means I can afford

to use additional plugins and launch more

websites to maximise my existing hosting

package.

CDN Impact

You can see from the below bandwidth graph below that

even though my website traffic increased, the data served

from my server has fallen considerably. This is an indication

that content is being servers via my CDN by the closet data

centre for users.

Pagespeed: Before & After

Measuring 2 different websites using the same theme on the

same host, we can see that the one that uses W3 Total

cache and EWWW has halved their page load time, is 520k

lighter and has 16 less requests – even though website A is

loaded with affiliate widgets and Adsense units.

Website A

Website B

Website A Performance: Pre vs Post changes

Using the same website and the same testing tool, we can

see that by using EWWW, we successfully trimmed 500k

from the page weight, and due to the improved code & asset

delivery, the website’s visual progress has improved by 1

second at both the 50% and 100% marks.

Summary

So even though I have added several new plugins to my

website to make it more secure and to improve delivery, I

have actually negated any noticeable impacts by installing

them.

Even though I was pretty confident with mod_pagespeed’s

out of the box functionality, it actually goes to show that you

can always go that little bit further to improve your results,

and you shouldn’t become

complacent believing what you have

is always the best solution – test, test

and test again – and forever strive for

the best results possible (backed up

by actual data).

Final Advice

• Monitor your website, check your stats and logs

• Utilise plugins / modules to automatically block bad bots /

visitors

• Block whole countries that serve no purpose accessing

your website

• Lock down your login page

• Utilise plugins / systems to make your website load faster

and reduce your page weight (it’s part of the Google

Algorithm and great for UX)

• Use a CDN – they are actually very cheap – even if you

host locally

• Forever test!

Follow Me

https://www.facebook.com/HolidayPointAU

https://twitter.com/HolidayPointAU

https://plus.google.com/+HolidaypointAu

http://www.flickr.com/photos/holidaypointau/

http://pinterest.com/holidaypointau/

http://www.youtube.com/user/HolidayPoint/

http://www.holidaypoint.com.au/

https://www.facebook.com/HolidayPointAU

https://twitter.com/HolidayPointAU

https://plus.google.com/+HolidaypointAu

http://www.flickr.com/photos/holidaypointau/

http://pinterest.com/holidaypointau/

http://www.youtube.com/user/HolidayPoint/

http://www.holidaypoint.com.au/

Reducing Server Resources: Improve Costs, SEO, Conversions & UX

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