WordPress is a popular open-source Content Management System (CMS) that lets developers build sophisticated websites. WordPress makes it easy to edit your site through a friendly browser interface and stores its content in a backend database (usually MySQL). While WordPress makes it easy to build websites, you need to make sure that pages load quickly. Having powerful database servers to fetch data quickly can solve the problem but can be very expensive.

Memcached is an open-source, distributed, in-memory key-value store that can retrieve data in milliseconds. Caching site information with Memcached can help you improve the performance and scalability of your site while controlling cost.

In this tutorial we will explore how to improve the performance of your WordPress website with Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached. ElastiCache for Memcached offers fully managed Memcached, so you no longer need to perform tasks such as hardware provisioning, setup, configuration, monitoring, software patching, and failure recovery. For this tutorial, we assume some Linux knowledge. Resources created in this tutorial are AWS Free Tier-eligible.

Note: To keep things simple in this tutorial it is important to create both WordPress and Memcached instances in your AWS account’s default VPC (virtual private cloud).