Setting up Premium AWS Route 53 DNS Zone for a WordPress Website
In this post, we will discuss how to add a hosted zone and create DNS records in AWS Route 53 DNS service for a WordPress website.
Speed is among the most critical factors in terms of SEO and website performance. While it is critical from a SEO viewpoint, it is also important for maintaining a superior user experience. This is as much true for a simple WordPress blog as for an ecommerce site. However, one of the most overlooked aspects of speeding up a wordpress website is DNS speed. Using the regular DNS is not enough to maintain suitable WordPress speed. Using premium DNS speeds up DNS lookup and improves loading speed. AWS Route 53 is among the most economic premium DNS services that you can easily configure within minutes using the AWS management console and use with your website. AWS offers its services to customers in 245 countries and territories through 99 availability zones and more than 400 edge locations.
For both the records, the routing policy will be simple. Once done, click on create records. You will be back on your hosted zones page and there would be four records now like in the image here. Route 53 propagates very fast, so the chances of experiencing any downtime are very low. You can refresh your website to check.
To check if your DNS is propagating, go to whatsmydns.net and enter the domain name. Check out the A records and NS records to see the status of propagation.
If you want, you can also add the other records like MX records and TXT records to the hosted zone. You can go back to your cpanel to check out the other records and enter them in Route 53 hosted zones. Keep the routing policy simple. Route 53 also offers other routing policies like latency based, geolocation based and IP based. However, for a simple WordPress site hosted on a single server, the routing policy would remain simple.
DNS speed matters just like the other aspects of site speed. Using premium AWS Route 53 DNS will help you speed up your DNS lookups and improve page loading times. AWS Route 53 is scalable, fast, secure, cost effective and highly available. You pay for what you use only. Using the AWS management console is also easy and you can delete a hosted zone easily if you do not want to use it or want to create a new one. To delete a hosted zone, first delete the entries you have made for A and CNAME records and then click on delete zone button near the top. The hosted zone will be deleted.
This content was originally published here.