Bonsai.ie and WordPress

Bonsai.ie was built using one of the best ‘Open Source’ blog publishing applications on the planet, WordPress. (v3.5.2) In the US alone over 70 million sites use WordPress and worldwide this is reported at 202 million1.

Being an ‘Open Source’ application it is completely free, although you can use professional add-on applications at a low cost.  This site uses a theme called ‘One Touch’ from Crumina. It is a minimal theme that is designed using HTML 5 and CSS 3. Plugins are kept to a minimum to reduce performance load.

As a technical manager who specializes in website performance, I have tested many hosting options from shared hosting, virtual multiple servers and finally have ended up using WPEngine. WPEngine guarantee performance and availability, which is very important for the user experience and if you are a business, a slow website would impact on your sales.

WPEngine costs $29month for up to 25K visitors. To find out more see the following link.

Bonsai.ie performance report link

With plugins my preference is to try and use professional software, why? well for support and less chance of any malware been used.

Plugins used on this website:

  1. Askimet for spam protection
  2. Advanced Social Media from Codecanyon.
  3. Contact form 7, free plugin but donations accepted.
  4. Social Counter from wordpress.org
  5. WordPress SEO from Yoast
  6. Jetpack from wordpress.com. Good for analysis, stats and subscriptions
  7. Cookie consent from Catapult. Need to satisfy the regulators.
  8. Simple local avatars for author images. From wordpress.org
  9. Woocommerce shopping cart
  10. Amazon S3 for mp3 files

With WPEngine I do have a staging website for testing any new updates, perfect for ensuring all works okay before deployment to live.

If you need any help with your blog, then post a comment below.

Reference:

1. Number of sites using WordPress