Changes on the hosting

Today there were a lot of changes on the hosting and I did some actions that I would like to review.

PHP settings

Ensure the PHP settings have enough memory, 32MBs is the default and it should be more.

General review

1. making sure all of WordPress is updated (plugins, themes, version, and php version, make sure you do this one at a time to not cause any overwrites or issues).
2. Turn off all plugins and theme
3. Delete any plugins/themes you don’t need
4. Make new .htaccess file
5. Turn on plugins/themes

Install W3 Total Cache plugin

First, remove any optimization plugins you’re using now.

Once installed the W3 Total Cache plugin,

1. Skip the setup wizard, and click General Settings.
2. Set these settings:
   1. Page Cache – Enable
   2. Minify – Enable
   3. Then, Save Settings.
3. Click the Minify page.
   1. Set both CSS/JS to “Combine Only”, and Save Settings.

Pages will be added to cache as they are accessed, so navigate a little bit and check that speed improves.

Blocking bots

This code below was added to avoid some bots

BOTS

#HUB Block Bots
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Sogou|ZoominfoBot|SeznamBot|MJ12bot|Yandex|PetalBot|BLEXBot|DotBot).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Buy me a coffee widget

Disable the widget and let just the button, the widget consumes a lot of time to load the pages.

GTmetrics tool

Use this tool to check the spped: https://gtmetrix.com/