Christopher Lauzon is the Head of Customer Happiness at WP Engine, focusing on providing excellent service and world class support to the WP Engine Community. Before WP Engine Chris specialized in eCommerce Consultation, helping and assisting 1000s of businesses with their web development projects.
Erick Hitter is a Boston-based web developer with Oomph, Inc. specializing in complex WordPress implementations for high-traffic sites, including several on the WordPress.com VIP platform. He is also responsible for the company’s BuddyPress projects and is a core contributor to WordPress. Erick has created a number of plugins available from the official repository, including WP Print Friendly and View All Posts Pages, as well as the WordPress.com VIP External Permalinks plugin.
What you can expect in their class, in their own words…
Developing and managing an optimized WordPress site can be challenging for anyone not familiar with how to scale a site. This presentation will cover some of the basics of putting together a WordPress site designed for excellent performance and scalability, followed by discussion about more advanced infrastructure topics.
Running a high-scale WordPress site starts with code optimization, including effective use of WordPress’ APIs. We’ll discuss WP_Query and the advantages of using it instead of direct database queries. We’ll also delve into the appropriate and effective use of WordPress’ two native caching APIs, which will lead into the infrastructure portion of our talk.
There are a million options when it comes to hosting your WordPress site, such as shared hosting, managed hosting, VPS, etc. Each has its advantages, which we’ll explore while discussing when stepping up to the next level becomes appropriate. We will also cover different methods of caching, including using database optimization methods, and implementing a content delivery network (CDN).
