Host an incredibly fast Wordpress website using WordOps on AWS Lightsail CDN

This is a really different post from my usual blogging about my photography. I did some web development long before I started my photography business, which really helped me out when I started my business in 2008. When I built my first site, I just used static HTML pages and had a separate blog running on WordPress. Several years later, I switched my entire site to WordPress. With some page caching techniques, WordPress can be just as fast as static web pages.

While you can find very cheap web hosting, for example, around $5 a month, it’s very slow, and you share resources with many other sites. On the other hand, you can purchase managed Wordpress hosting that is very fast on a site like WP Engine. There you are spending around $100 a month if you want to host multiple sites and have decent storage. Google partially ranks pages based on speed, and with an update coming soon, they are making this even more important. So website speed is very important.

Info about abbreviations I use below:
CDN = Content Delivery Network
AWS = Amazon Web Services
VPS = Virtual Private Server

Can I have ultimate WordPress speed for $10 a month?

Step by Step instructions for a super-speed NGINX WordPress server setup

So why am I making this post? While most of what I’m writing here can be found by searching around through various help documents, I wanted to make a simple step-by-step if you would like to set up a server just like mine. There is no help document I’ve seen that combines all the techniques I list below. Also, while I have all this setup in my mind, I want to write it down! This way, it will be easy if I have to do this again in the future. I’m not going to explain everything in detail. I’m just going to tell you the basic steps. If you want to understand more about what you are doing, there is a lot of documentation online.

Step 1: Create an Amazon Lightsail Server Instance

Step 2: Give your server a static ip address and switch to AWS DNS

You now have your very own web server running on the AWS cloud! Now, you must get WordPress running on it and your domain to point to it. First of all, click the Networking Tab and select “Create Static IP”. Under “Attach to an instance”, select the instance you just created and click the “Create Button”. This will give your server a permanent IP address on the internet.

Step 3: Create your Lightsail CDN Distribution and attach it to your instance ( This makes your site super fast )

The following setup will distribute your resources at various locations worldwide using the AWS CDN. This is similar to a very popular service called Cloudflare, however using the AWS CDN has advantages over Cloudflare, such as selecting headers to send and cache based upon. This allows you to serve webp images to supported browsers, which isn’t possible without a paid Cloudflare subscription. There are other advantages as well, such as your own SSL certificate, and the performance should be better than that of free Cloudflare.

(Optional) A special tweak I discovered to serve Webp images to compatible browsers

Next select your Distribution Plan, the 50GB/month should be plenty and it’s free for the first year. It’s only $2.50 per month after that! Then click “Create Distribution”. Now, under the distribution you just created, select the “custom domains” tab. First, under Certificates, select “create certificate”. Enter the domain name of your website, for example, ryansmithphotography.com and www.ryansmithphotography.com. This will provide one or two cname records you need to add to your DNS settings. Please copy and paste these into a notes document, you will need them later.

Step 4: Configure your DNS Zone

Your A record is what connects your domain name, such as ryansmithphotography.com, to your new web server. Click “add record”, select A record, under “Subdomain” enter the @ symbol, and under “Resolves to” select your distribution. Also, add the cname records I told you to copy and paste into a document in the last step. Just add them as Name and Value just as you see them, except for the “Name:” value, leaving off the .yourdomainname.com at the end. For example, don’t paste in the .ryansmithphotography.com part of the name value, it’s redundant.

Now give this some time to validate. Then go back to your Networking tab, select your distribution, go to the Custom Domains tab, and select the “Enable Custom Domains” check box. This will only work once your Certificate is validated. If the certificate doesn’t validate after a few hours, make sure you entered the cname values in correctly in the last step.

Step 5: Configure your NGINX web server using WordOps

Now for the fun part. You have your server running, your DNS is configured, your domain name points to your server, and you are behind the super-fast AWS CDN. But you have no website!

Go back to your Lightsail home page, under your instances click the three dots and select connect. You are now looking at a command line interface to your server running on AWS. Go to the WordOps home page here. Wordops is a script that makes it easy to set up NGINX, create a database, and install all necessary packages to run Wordpress. It also configures best practices for NGINX to host WordPress. Follow the One-Step Automated Install process. It’s just one command. Or follow what I list below.

Enter the following commands in order, select yes to any questions:

sudo -i
apt update
apt upgrade
wget -qO wo wops.cc && sudo bash wo

Now that WordOps is installed, creating WordPress sites on your server is easy. You can find more info here https://docs.wordops.net/getting-started/creating-sites/. This is how I recommend creating your first site, but you can create as many as you like. For this setup, we are deliberately not using letsencrypt on the server, ssl is being handled by the distribution.

Enter the following command. As newer versions of PHP are released, you can, of course, change this to the current version.

wo site create yourdomainname.com --wpredis --php74

Of course, replace yourdomainname.com with your domain name! This will set up a WordPress site with Redis caching and PHP 7.4. You don’t need any caching plugins like WPRocket or WPSuperCache for this installation. The caching is now done on the server level. Very Important: After you install your website, please make a note of the username and password of your WordPress admin and other settings. You will need these later. There is a lot more you can do with WordOps. Please read their documentation for more.

I also recommend configuring automatic updates, you can find a tutorial here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticSecurityUpdates?_ga=2.12899127.1830712473.1613088360-1101157258.1613088360

Step 6: Setup website for HTTPS

You should almost be done now. One other step is to get https working correctly. For more details, view the documentation here https://lightsail.aws.amazon.com/ls/docs/en_us/articles/amazon-lightsail-editing-wp-config-for-distribution.

For our server setup, type in the following command: replace mydomainname.com with your website domain name.

nano /var/www/mydomainname.com/wp-config.php

This will open up a basic text editor. Use your arrow keys to navigate the file. Scroll down to where it says “That’s all, stop editing!” and paste in the following code on a blank line. Position your cursor where you want to paste, right click and select paste. Then hit control v to exit the file and select save. If you mess something up, just exit but don’t save.

define('WP_SITEURL', 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/');
define('WP_HOME', 'https://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/');
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_CLOUDFRONT_FORWARDED_PROTO'])
&& $_SERVER['HTTP_CLOUDFRONT_FORWARDED_PROTO'] === 'https') {
$_SERVER['HTTPS'] = 'on';
}

If you are using the Shortpixel plugin to generate webp images, also add this to your wp-config.php file. This switches Shortpixel to generate webp images that end in .jpg.webp, this is required for WordOps to send them instead of jpeg images. More info here.

define('SHORTPIXEL_USE_DOUBLE_WEBP_EXTENSION', true);

Step 7: Visit your site and setup WordPress

Your website should be working now if everything was done correctly. Login using the credentials you saved during setup and begin setting up WordPress. There is much more to having a fast site than just hosting, but this will give you a great base to build a fast site. If you are migrating from your previous hosting, I recommend backing up and restoring using the UpdraftPlus Backup plugin. If all this is too complex, let me know. If you are having any issues, let me know in the comments!