We run a travel blog at joyofexploringtheworld.com that helps travellers plan itineraries—hosted on a low-cost VPS with Docker Compose and Cloudflare’s free tier. Here are four changes that improved speed without changing hosts or paying for premium plugins.

1. Give the database more memory Link to heading

On a 24 GB VPS, MariaDB’s default InnoDB buffer pool (~128 MB) was too small. We increased it to 2 GB and set a 4 GB memory limit on the DB container. Redis’s maxmemory was raised from 1 GB to 2 GB.

Lesson: Match DB and cache memory to available RAM. Set container limits to avoid runaways.

2. Turn off PHP “check for file changes” in production Link to heading

In production, PHP’s OPcache was still checking whether files had changed on every request. We set opcache.validate_timestamps=0 in a dedicated config file (e.g. 99-opcache.ini) mounted into the container. PHP no longer stats files on every request.

Lesson: In production, disable file-change checks so OPcache serves cached bytecode without extra I/O.

3. Add a lightweight health-check page Link to heading

We replaced the healthcheck target from wp-cron.php (or worse, admin-ajax.php, which returns 400 without an action parameter) with a minimal /health.php that returns 200 without bootstrapping WordPress. Every healthcheck poll no longer hits full WordPress.

Lesson: Use an endpoint that returns 200 on a simple GET. Avoid admin-ajax.php for healthchecks.

4. Prioritise the first big image (LCP) Link to heading

The first large above-the-fold image had no fetchpriority="high" and was lazy-loaded. We added an output buffer or filter to set fetchpriority="high" and loading="eager" on the first large content image (excluding the small logo).

Lesson: The first large image drives LCP. Give it high priority and avoid lazy-loading it.

What you can do Link to heading

  1. Check your MariaDB innodb_buffer_pool_size and Redis maxmemory against available RAM.
  2. Set opcache.validate_timestamps=0 in production.
  3. Use a minimal health endpoint for Docker/Traefik healthchecks.
  4. Ensure the first large image has fetchpriority="high" and loading="eager".

Small, focused changes like these can improve speed without a migration.