Building WordPress to Scale
AIM4 Applications, Integration and Mobile
Location: 102B, Wisconsin Center
MONDAY, 11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Stories.Illinoisstate.edu is a WordPress site that centralizes Illinois State University news. Since its inception, it grew steadily as additional departments and units also started contributing to the content. Eventually, the infrastructure supporting the site was unable to handle the traffic it was receiving, causing poor response time and crashing. To rectify the issues, its infrastructure was completely recreated using Amazon Web Services, Nginx, PHP-FPM, and other technologies. The infrastructure was built to be redundant and automatically scalable under load using functionality built into Amazon Web Services and extensions to WordPress. This presentation will walk through the process of improving performance, and explore what room there is for further developments.
Presenters
Jordan Thompson
Web Developer, Illinois State University
Jordan Thompson is a web developer from the Web & Interactive Communications department at Illinois State University. Having managed and developed the university's WordPress installation for several years, Thompson has extensive WordPress and development experience, as well as an understanding of all aspects of full stack application development.