You should get a real site. Don't use Wordpress.

My feeling is that if you pay someone to optimize your current site, it might work if you get the right developer but, you may have to do it again when you have 1,200 visitors. Then, again when you have 2,000 visitors.

Do you have 1000 visitors at the same time ?
How long single user session takes?
Can you answer these questions by i.e. looking at google analytics ?

First I must say - I'm not wordpress expert, I just don't like it as I'm a programmer, and it's really not very developer friendly environment, not saying that it's bad or it cannot be optimized - I'm sure it can.

It would be helpful if you shared your URL, but if you don't want to then
I can give you some basics you should understand if you want to solve this yourself.

1. Check how much your page weights with all your resources. Maybe you have a lot of heavy resources like big images etc - you can try moving everything into CDN like Amazon cloud or anything else so images and all external resources (images, css, js ) can be served by different server .
That's first thing and the easiest, there are many user friendly cdn-s - i.e. maxcdn, amazon etc , just google - any big player should work fine .

if that doesn't help see if you don't have a bottle neck, which can be a database query or some long running server side operation . You would need to google how to find and monitor database queries, I don't know your site if it's database heavy or whatever . if you're on vps and using mysql you can type show processlist from mysql console and monitor it in realtime or setup logs for long queries.
Also see if your mysql is tuned

Next or even step before - see if your web server is optimised - if it's apache
btw. what's your VPS CPU /RAM / HDD ?

1000 simultaneus visitors is really quite a lot for not programmer to solve the problem .
But anyway I'll continue ..

So if you don't have enough CPU/RAM/HDD - try the 'hammer' method - just increase CPU and RAM.
It's not solving the problem of course but might buy you some time .
If IO is a problem try SSD drives if possible .

If you still have problems - try load balancing - if it's possible for your website.
That means hosting your site on more than single server... but it has quite few issues that have to be solved ..


If your site works and it's complicated rewriting might not be the best idea.
If it's simple enough - better to keep it as simple as possible - meaning - no wordpress .

ping me on priv if you need help .

good luck

Send me a link to your site . I can check and tell you what is holding your site from running fast.

A link to your site would be helpful so we can run a diagnosis

Like I said - I would first try moving every external resource to CDN ( js, css, images ), I'm no wordpress expert but maybe there are some plugins for that.

Can you also post your VPS RAM and CPU details ?

You don't have any users logged in there right ?
Maybe some caching solution is good for you .
You should cache everything you can - db queries first as they can kill CPU / IO .
Then you can try something like Varnish to serve whole website from cache.

So my road would be :

0. Increase server capaticy if it's not best you can get at the moment already
1. Move resources to CDN
2. Use cache on DB queries (memcached or redis )
3. Varnish
4. Load Balance

My guess: Plugins are the trouble - because they are build for start-up (i.e. 10-20 visitors)
My solution: Go to freelancing site and hire web-designer. It would probably cost between $50 and $100.

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This is a process of making changes in your website it will appear higher in search engine result page based on the number of factor search engine evaluate your website relevance readability before assigning the position search engine result page.

If this is a VPS server, then you can log in through SSH/PUTTY, enter "htop" command and see what processes weight down your server.

Second thing, it's worth it to look into apache / ngix logs, because often (especially on WordPress) website is weight down by browsers bots, which are indexing your content.

Most often on the server, it is not only PHP that burdens but SQL.

Since it's on a VPS you can optimise things a bit.

- Use a caching plugin so you mostly serve static pages but don't use too many other plugins
- If you use plugins that simply output static content such as plugins for Google Analytics just add the code snippets directly in the templates
- Use a CDN/CloudFlare
- Use APC if you use PHP5 or a more recent version of PHP
- If you use Apache, switch to Nginx with FastCGI
- If you can, move the database to another VPS

These are the basics....

Your site is very small overall, running it on wordpress is not worth the amount of processing power you are using. It's not the plugins, it's the framework itself. You are loading a ton of external files, running imports, checking permissions, all to load up a couple images and some text with a menu. It would be far less resource intensive to build the site into several static webpages, turn on gzip compression, and update by hand instead of using a database system to store and retrieve stories. Even on a shared VPS you would be able to handle 2-3k concurrent users like that, rather than a couple hundred using Wordpress.

With the size of your site, and the need for an easy way to add stories (I'm assuming you do it manually?) I would do a full rebuild with optimization as well as a build page for about $500. I wouldn't pay any more than that to have it done, but I would make the change away from Wordpress if you want to go forward with more users at one time.

Consider going with a VPS otherwise, and getting away from a shared hosting provider. A great one would be: http://dirl.org/server.php. It'll cost a bit more, but it'll run with m0r power, which makes all the difference when your pushing a full CMS with it to thousands of people.

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