ServerlessWP

Host your WordPress site on serverless — more affordable and more performant when optimized with edge caching.

Deploy View Demo

WordPress hosting is silly.

Low maintenance and low cost/free WordPress hosting on Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda.

ServerlessWP puts PHP & WordPress in serverless functions. Deploy this repository to give it a try.

Stay up-to-date at the ServerlessWP repository: github.com/mitchmac/serverlesswp

Quick Deploy

Click one of the options below to deploy your serverless WordPress site:

Vercel (recommended)	Netlify

🕑 60 second max request duration	10 second max request duration
⎇ automatic branch deploy config	manual branch config
🗲 Fluid compute	-
📈 Web analytics	paid add-on
🛡️ Firewall	paid add-on

Want to use AWS Lambda with the Serverless Framework instead? npm install && serverless deploy

Project goals

🌴 WordPress hosting made easy. Lower maintenance with serverless functions instead of servers.

💲 Small WordPress sites shouldn't cost much to host. Vercel, Netlify, & AWS have free tiers.

🔓 WordPress plugins and themes are extensively supported. No arbitrary limitations here.

⚡ Blazing fast websites that take advantage of caching and content delivery networks.

🌎 Lower the carbon footprint of WordPress websites.

🤝 A helpful community. Share your successes, ideas, or struggles in the discussions.

Deploy ServerlessWP

This is currently an experimental project.

It's a good fit for development, personal blogs, documentation sites, and small business sites. It shouldn't be used when considerable security or stability is required, yet.

1. Deploy this repository to Vercel, Netlify, or AWS.

One of the links above will get you started. You'll just need a GitHub account.

2. Setup a database.

You'll need to create a database for your site's content.

TiDB provides a cloud database with a generous free tier.

Wouldn't it be great to skip hosting a database? Skip below if you want to try something different with SQLite & S3.

3. Update the environment variables.

After creating your database you'll need to update environment variables for your project with the credentials. The WordPress config file wp-config.php is automatically configured to use these values to connect to the database.

Update the environment variables in Vercel/Netlify:


DATABASE	database name you created
USERNAME	database user to access the database
PASSWORD	database user's password
HOST	address to access the database
TABLE_PREFIX	optional: to use a prefix on the database tables

See here for Vercel and here for Netlify for more about managing environment variables. Remember to redeploy your project after updating the environment variables if you update them after initially deploying your project.

4. File and media uploads with S3 (optional, can be done later)

File and media uploads can be enabled using the included WP Offload Media Lite for Amazon S3 plugin. S3 setup details can be found here. The wp-config.php file is setup to use the following environment variables for use by the plugin:

S3_KEY_ID
S3_ACCESS_KEY

SQLite + S3 database option

WordPress usually runs with a MySQL (or MariaDB) database. That means hosting a database that runs 24/7.

A SQLite database option has been developed by members of the WordPress community. With the recent ability to conditionally write to S3-compatible object storage a decentralized and serverless data layer for ServerlessWP is possible.

Check out the diagram of the SQLite+S3 logic if you're interested in how it works.

ServerlessWP supports both SQLite+S3 and MySQL as database options. Some of the trade-offs:

SQLite+S3	MySQL
🕑 on demand	24/7 hosting
💲 usage based (free tiers)	monthly fees (some limited free tiers)
🧩 some plugin incompatibility	full plugin compatibility
♾️ limited database update concurrency	few concurrency limitations
✔️ blogs, dev sites, documentation, single editor sites	any site

The main trade-off of using SQLite+S3 with ServerlessWP is:

if requests are handled by multiple underlying serverless functions at the same time and make a change to the database, the competing requests may fail. Sites with multiple editors working at the same time or receiving many form submissions aren't a great fit for SQLite+S3.

Want to give it a try? Setup a private S3 bucket and use these environment variables:

SQLite+S3
SQLITE_S3_BUCKET	bucket name you created
SQLITE_S3_API_KEY	API key to access the bucket
SQLITE_S3_API_SECRET	API secret key to access the bucket
SQLITE_S3_REGION	region where the bucket lives - create it near your serverless functions
SQLITE_S3_ENDPOINT	optional: to update where the bucket is, like a Cloudflare R2 address

Customizing WordPress

WordPress and its files are in the /wp directory. You can add plugins or themes there in their respective directories in wp-content then commit the files to your repository so it will re-deploy.
Plugins like Cache-Control can enable CDN caching with the s-maxage directive and make your site super fast. Refer to Vercel Edge Caching or Netlfiy Cache Headers

Customizing ServerlessWP

netlify.toml or vercel.json are where we configure /api/index.js to handle all requests
mitchmac/serverlesswp-node is used to run PHP and handle the request
You can modify the incoming request through the event object in api/index.js. You can also modify the WordPress response object there. ServerlessWP has a basic plugin system to do this. Checkout out /api/index.js for hints.