This whitepaper is for historical reference only. Some content might be outdated and some links might not be available.

# Improving performance and cost efficiency
<a name="improving-performance-and-cost-efficiency"></a>

 You may eventually outgrow your single-server deployment. In this case, you may need to consider options for improving your website’s performance. Before migrating to a multi-server, scalable deployment (discussed later in this paper), there are a number of performance and cost efficiencies you can apply. These are good practices that you should follow anyway, even if you do move to a multi-server architecture. 

 The following sections introduce a number of options that can improve aspects of your WordPress website’s performance and scalability. Some can be applied to a single-server deployment, whereas others take advantage of the scalability of multiple servers. Many of those modifications require the use of one or more WordPress plugins. Although various options are available, [W3 Total Cache](https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/) is a popular choice that combines many of those modifications in a single plugin. 

**Topics**
+ [Accelerating content delivery](accelerating-content-delivery.md)
+ [Database caching](database-caching.md)
+ [Bytecode caching](bytecode-caching.md)