DMIT WordPress Deployment: LEMP to Performance

Why WordPress on DMIT

WordPress is the world's most widely used site platform — modest in requirements but hungry for PHP and database performance. DMIT cloud servers provide dedicated vCPU, SSD and selectable optimised routes, making them a solid host for production WordPress sites. This guide walks through deploying a high-performance WordPress site from scratch.

Prerequisites

An initialised DMIT instance (2 vCPU / 2GB recommended, see First Deploy Checklist)
Domain A/AAAA records pointing to the server IP (see DNS & Domain Setup)
Security hardening done (see SSH Hardening)

Install the LEMP stack

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt update
apt install nginx mariadb-server php-fpm php-mysql php-curl php-gd php-intl \
  php-mbstring php-soap php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip -y

# secure the database
mysql_secure_installation

Create the WordPress database and user:

CREATE DATABASE wordpress DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
CREATE USER 'wpuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong-password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON wordpress.* TO 'wpuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Download and configure WordPress

cd /var/www
curl -O https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzvf latest.tar.gz
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/wordpress
cp wordpress/wp-config-sample.php wordpress/wp-config.php

Edit wp-config.php with the database name, user and password, and replace the key section with output from the official salt generator:

curl -s https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/

Nginx site config

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com www.example.com;
    root /var/www/wordpress;
    index index.php index.html;

    location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
    }
    location ~* \.(css|js|png|jpg|jpeg|webp|svg|woff2)$ {
        expires 30d;
        add_header Cache-Control "public";
    }
}

Enable the site, issue an HTTPS certificate for the domain (see HTTPS/SSL Setup), then visit the domain to finish the five-minute install wizard.

Performance essentials

PHP OPcache: ensure opcache.enable=1 — cuts repeated PHP compilation sharply
Page cache plugin: WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache turns dynamic pages into static HTML
Object cache: install Redis and enable the redis-cache plugin for query caching
Image compression: use WebP and lazy loading
CDN: add Cloudflare to accelerate static assets (see Cloudflare CDN Setup)

Deeper system/Nginx tuning in Performance Tuning; database layer in Database Optimisation.

Backup and update policy

Daily database backups + weekly full site backups (see Monitoring & Backup)
Keep core, themes and plugins updated; back up before updating
Remove unused plugins — abandoned plugins are the most common entry point

Common issues

Admin dashboard very slow?

Usually slow database queries or a missing object cache. Diagnose with the slow query log (see Database Optimisation) and add Redis object caching.

413 error on upload?

# inside the http block of nginx.conf
client_max_body_size 64m;

Permalinks return 404?

Make sure Nginx includes try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;, then re-save the permalink settings once in wp-admin.

DNS & Domain Setup, Docker Deployment Guide, Troubleshooting Guide.

Data checked: 2026-08-18. Software versions follow official documentation.