Build Highly Performant WordPress Sites with Minio and WP Offload Media

Ben Lobaugh
4 min readJan 4, 2021

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:

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Ben Lobaugh

Director of Engineering at Mindsize. 20+ year technology veteran. Providing leadership insights, mentorship, and coaching to new and existing leaders.