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Build Highly Performant WordPress Sites with Minio and WP Offload Media
WordPress is the leading content management system and it is often thought that WordPress cannot scale. That assertion is a bit misleading. It is true that out of the box WordPress does not scale well, however, WordPress has a flexible hooks system that provides developers with the ability to tap into and alter many of its features. With a little effort, WordPress can indeed be made to be highly performant and infinitely scalable.
One of the first steps that must be taken when building any highly performant and scalable website is to offload the uploaded media files from the web servers. Amazon’s S3 is the top contender in this area, but there are many reasons why it may be desirable to host the files on your own server. Minio is an open source project that allows you to run and host your own S3 compliant service. Minio can be run as a standalone or fully distributed service and has been used to power sites with many terabytes of media.
In this article I am going to show you how I was able to leverage the WordPress WP Offload Media plugin to host uploaded media files on a Minio service.
Both WordPress and Minio have well written installation guides. You will need both set up if you are following along:
There are two versions of WP Offload Media:
- Lite (Free)
- Pro (Paid)
The Lite version is free and provides everything you need to host new images on Minio. The Pro version has some nice additional features, such as the ability to migrate existing files in the Media Library. Both versions are excellent. Which you need will be dependent upon your use case.
For the rest of this article, I will be using on of my own websites for demonstration purposes. The site is live and available at https://lobaugh.fish. Raising fish has been a hobby of mine since I was a child. This is a site I have been working on that will allow anyone to share my passion, and get a glimpse into my tanks.
At the this articles was published, the site architecture was:
- Digital Ocean server
- Docker running the site and services
- WordPress 5.5.5
- Minio, running as a standalone Docker container
