Throughout our journey of helping you create the perfect, optimized & fast website, we will need some extra help from the third-party services that need to be used alongside Thrive Suite.
We’ve decided to create this short guide on what are the requirements (some of which are mandatory, and some are recommended), in order for your website to work as fast and efficient as possible.
WordPress Requirements
Of course, as Thrive Suite is a WordPress-based tool, we will have to start with the basic requirements needed in order for WordPress to properly function.
The hosting provider should support:
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PHP minimum version – 7.4
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Database services minimum versions:
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MySQL – 5.6
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MariaDB – 10.1
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HTTPS support
You can read about this on wordpress.org as well. These are required in order for the latest WordPress version to work accordingly.
WordPress Version
To use the Thrive Themes plugins, we will kindly ask you to upgrade to WordPress version 5.0 or greater.
Server Recommendations
As for the hosting server goes, here are our recommendations:
You can, of course, go for other providers as well. As long as the hosting provider supports and works well with WordPress, it will work just as fine with any Thrive Suite plugin.
Server Limitations
A website will properly function with the basic server limitations, and it is not mandatory for you to increase your server limitations.
In case you experience any issues on your site and decide to contact our team and ask for help, we will ask about server limitations throughout the debugging process, as this is an often found problem on our users’ websites.
For this reason, in some cases, we do recommend asking your hosting provider if there are any strict limitations on your server. If there are any, we recommend that you ask the hosting provider to increase them for you.
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Important! Again, increasing the server limitations is not mandatory – it might just help in some situations. |
In the eventuality that you would want to increase them, here are the recommended server limitations that we’ve noticed to work best, throughout our experience:
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PHP memory limit – set to 512 MB
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PHP post max size – greater or equal to 50 MB
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WP max memory limit – 128/256 MB
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Upload max filesize – 50 MB
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PHP max Input Variables – 2500
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Max Execution Time – around 300
To make things even easier for you, we have created an article on how you can ask the hosting provider to increase your server limitations:
Server Limitations for File Protection
In some cases, the server might not be correctly configured and, as a result, it will not allow Thrive Plugins to protect your files. We have created the “Protected files” feature in order to provide a way for course creators to protect the files uploaded on their websites.
This way, any file (PDF, XLS, DOC, etc.) that you might be included as resources for courses will be protected from being shared by students or course participants.
If you see a warning related to your server having some limitations in this direction, you need to contact your hosting provider and ask them to make some modifications to the main code.
You can find the modifications here.
Other General Recommendations
Staging Sites and Backups
Besides all of these, we highly recommend also creating a staging site, as well as periodically back it up. Please use these resources as guidance in these matters:
Use our Asset Optimization Tool
Moreover, when talking about a fast and well-optimized website, there is some action you can take.
We have developed an optimization project, which we’ve called Project Lightspeed – and its purpose is to help you load only the necessary files on your sites. So, instead of loading big and un-needed CSS and JavaScript files, you can enable the “Asset optimization” tool, and this will increase your site speed score significantly.
Find out more about Project Lightspeed here:
The Site Speed Section
In the Thrive Theme Builder dashboard, there is also a “Site Speed” section that can be used to help you improve and optimize your site.
The Site Speed page contains a few different sections that you can go through and learn what you can do in order to increase the loading speed of your website.
Please read this article for more information:
The article will explain how and why you should use caching plugins, image optimization plugins, AMP, and so on.
Following all of these recommendations, your website should be working at great speed and the loading time should be very low.
Should you experience any issues, please be sure to contact our support team, and they will quickly get in touch and help you solve them.
Hopefully, this article was useful to you. Don’t forget that our knowledge base is one click away. Make sure to leave a smile on your way out 😄