PHP workers play an important role in a WordPress site’s performance.
When you visit a site and request some information, you get a response in a matter of seconds. But a lot of things are happening in the background within this quick window of time that no one can see.
PHP workers, web servers, databases, and more act in unison to give the information you asked for. If anything goes wrong, the overall site performance can suffer.
So, if you are an individual or business who wants to know what these PHP workers are and how they impact WordPress site performance, read on.
What Is a PHP Worker?
A PHP worker is a computing process running in the background on a server and executing PHP code.
It waits to receive the instruction, processes it in the background using the required RAM and CPU resources, and comes back with the response. It again waits for another instruction and the cycle continues.
In WordPress, the role of PHP workers is to process tasks in the background, create pages, generate reports, and more. They generate and serve HTML pages for site visitors and decide how many uncached requests the site can process at a time. If the number of requests exceeds what the site can handle, additional requests will have to wait until the others are done processing.
This is the reason why larger websites like community forms, ecommerce sites, etc. need more PHP workers to process more requests concurrently without breaking a sweat. However, you must also ensure not to add too many PHP workers to prevent them from consuming significant server resources.
What’s the Need for PHP Workers
If you want to continue serving your site visitors with faster responses to their requests, you need PHP workers running in the background and processing those requests. Having PHP workers is beneficial in so many ways:
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Large file handling:
When you use PHP workers, processing large data sets or files becomes more efficient in terms of time and resource consumption.
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Faster response:
Since PHP workers process user requests in the background and provide faster responses, this helps enhance the user experience on your site.
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Managing themes and plugins:
Some WordPress themes and plugins might need you to process certain features like updating the setting in the background. PHP workers are useful here.
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Handling scheduled tasks:
PHP workers can efficiently run scheduled tasks like cleaning databases, syncing data, sending bulk emails, processing queues, and more.
How PHP Works on a WordPress Site
Here’s the typical path PHP follows when working on a WordPress site:
- A visitor makes a request on a WordPress website, such as browsing a product.
- The web server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) of the website receives this request and forwards it to PHP.
- PHP starts querying the database (like MySQL) as per the need. It uses PHP templates of the applied theme to create a fresh HTML page.
- Next, PHP sends the HTML page to the web server.
- The web server now serves this page to the visitor.
All these processes happen in split seconds from the moment the visitor clicks on something on the website to when they get the response in the form of a page. In the above process, making the database query needs PHP workers to do the heavy lifting and consumes the highest server resources. If your site has a cleaner codebase and optimized database queries, PHP workers will have to do less work, and server resource consumption will be less.
How PHP Workers Influence WordPress Site Performance
Many factors influence WordPress site performance. It could be the number of PHP workers, code quality, task complexity, dynamic content, plugins and themes, etc. PHP workers are tasked to process all these attributes, which ultimately impacts website performance. Let’s understand how.
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Number of PHP Workers
As your WordPress website grows, high traffic starts coming in and PHP workers will have more work to do. If you run out of your PHP workers, additional requests will be kept in a queue for processing while the current one runs.
So, adding more PHP works will ensure more tasks can run simultaneously on the server and finish faster. It doesn’t mean you should end up having too many PHP workers that exhaust resources and cause delays in processing each task. It could result in database slowdowns, downtimes, page unresponsiveness, and slow page loading. This negatively affects site search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience.
Similarly, fewer PHP workers than required means the server has sufficient resources but you lack workers to complete the tasks. It can lead your site to perform poorly, delaying responses.
Thus, the best approach is to find the right balance, neither too many nor too few PHP workers to process requests. You must add the number of PHP workers based on your WordPress site’s needs like CPU quality, PHP processing you need, code base, types of jobs processed, and more.
In general, if your site has more complex tasks and lower code quality, go for fewer workers. You can also experiment with different numbers of PHP workers and find your best spot, ensuring your CPU capacity is 80 to 100 percent when subjected to load.
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Caching
Caching is vital for website speed and performance. So, if a page doesn’t serve visitor-specific, dynamic content, it needs to be cached. Web servers such as Nginx perform optimally when they are served from the cache. They also can handle large traffic volumes concurrently with minimal PHP processing.
Once cached, the page will store pre-processed JS, CSS, and HTML to be used for a browser. In this scenario, Nginx just stores the copy and won’t need to send any request to PHP for page creation. This means PHP workers are required to do less work and performance increases.
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Dynamic Content Served
Dynamic websites such as e-commerce stores, forums, learning management systems, etc. involve frequent cache bypasses. This means web servers such as Nginx won’t serve pre-processed JS, CSS, or HTML. These websites need more server resources and the number of PHP workers to process requests, which affects site performance.
To mitigate that you must assess your site’s needs and employ a sufficient number of PHP workers to ensure good site performance.
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Code Quality and Task Complexity
The amount of work a PHP worker needs to do to process a request directly depends on the codebase quality of your WordPress site. Good codebase quality means that PHP workers will need to do less work and processing will be faster.
Complex requests such as searching and sorting through a vast catalog require more work from the database and PHP workers. In this case, if your site’s codebase quality isn’t good, the task will consume higher server resources, impacting site performance.
However, if the codebase quality is excellent, it will require less work from PHP workers and the database to process the request and consume fewer server resources. This also means your site will be capable of processing more number of tasks faster in a given timeframe. Ultimately, your site speed and performance increase and so does user experience.
Thus, keep your codebase clean and lightweight. Use lean plugins, themes, and modules.
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Server and Resources
PHP workers use server resources like CPU and RAM to process a request. So, if the server has an efficient CPU and sufficient resources, it will execute code faster. In this case, PHP workers will need to do less work. As a result, your site’s performance, response time, and user experience will improve significantly.
In the meantime, the quality of your server and hosting service is also a factor impacting site performance. If the hosting service offers you high-performance, advanced servers with the latest hardware and software, your performance is likely to improve by a large margin and with optimized PHP workers.
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PHP Version
WordPress site’s performance may also depend on the PHP version employed in your site. The latest PHP versions are built with performance in mind.
So, if you want your PHP workers to perform optimally and obtain high performance, consider using the latest PHP version. At the time of writing this article, 8.3 is considered to be the fastest that can provide a significant boost to your site’s performance.
Tips to Enhance Site Performance by Optimizing PHP Worker’s Utilization
To enhance your WordPress site’s performance, you will need to optimize PHP worker utilization. And to optimize PHP worker utilization, you must reduce total PHP and CPU resources for processing requests.
Here are some ways to achieve that.
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Enable Caching
Enable caching in your WordPress site. This helps web servers perform optimally when serving requests to users from the cache.
So, if your page is serving static content and is not tailored for a specific user, consider caching it. This will eliminate the need for the web server to send any request to PHP to generate a page or utilize server resources in the process. Thus, PHP workers will create the page only once and cache it for further requests. Thus, server resources could be saved, PHP workers would have less work to do, and site performance would improve.
You can enable page caching on your site in two ways:
- Plugin-based caching using a WordPress plugin, such as WP Super Cache or WP Rocket
- Server-level caching using a web server, such as Apache or Nginx
In addition to page caching, you must also enable object caching. It’s useful for large websites with heavy traffic and dynamic pages like ecommerce stores and community forums that can’t enable page caching.
For these websites, you can enable persistent object caching using services like Redis. This will help reduce PHP workloads and enhance site performance.
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Use Plugins Wisely
Adding too many plugins can impact your WordPress site’s performance by eating up server resources and requiring PHP workers to process more tasks.
So, it would be wise to use only those plugins that you actually need for your site. Disable plugins that are not necessary or lack updates in the last 6 months. It will not only free up some space but safeguard your site from possible security breaches.
At the same time, site performance can improve. Also, use plugins only when you absolutely need them. In addition, use only necessary and lightweight themes, templates, and functions on your site. Ensure they are updated and secure.
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Improve Codebase
Improving the codebase quality of your WordPress site will ensure PHP workers can work faster and come up with quick responses, without consuming too much server resources.
So, optimize your codebase by assessing and improving it. Ensure it’s clean, clear, and lightweight to consume less server resources and PHP worker utilization when processing a request.
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Choose High-Performance WordPress Host
When you choose WordPress hosting, ensure you get performance-focused features. Check out the quality of their hardware and software, resources like CPU and RAM capacity, SSDs, and server quality.
We at AccuWeb Hosting offer the latest, advanced servers and hardware, sufficient CPU and RAM capacity, and quality performance-enhancers. We provide LSCache and LiteSpeed plugins, a 99% uptime guarantee, CloudLinux OS, SSD storage, and the latest PHP support.
You can also checkout our WordPress Cloud Hosting services provided by AccuWeb.Cloud.
Conclusion
In a WordPress site, PHP workers execute PHP code in the background, utilizing server resources like CPU and RAM to facilitate user requests.
In this post, we have discussed how PHP workers can impact WordPress site performance based on different factors, such as the number of PHP workers, quality of codebase themes, and plugins, caching, PHP versions, and more. We also have outlined some tips to optimize PHP worker utilization and improve site performance.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. How many PHP workers do I need?
Answer: When you have a static website like a startup website, brochure website, etc., you may need around 2-4 PHP workers depending on the site’s complexity, traffic, etc.
But if you have a bigger website like an e-commerce store, forums, etc., you will need at least 4 PHP workers.
2. What do PHP workers do?
Answer: PHP workers in WordPress play an important role in generating HTML pages that web servers can serve visitors. It also determines whether your site can handle uncached requests.
3. Why does WordPress need PHP?
Answer: WordPress stores all your website data, from blog name to user profile settings, in a MySQL database. PHP collects information from the same database to process user requests and create HTML pages.
