EC2 Instance running a news website has major performance issues

Question

We are running a regional news website ( https://www.galwaydaily.com/ ) on an AWS EC2 instance (t3 medium).

The problem is that the page load speed over the past few months has gone up and up and a few days ago the site stopped working altogether for a few hours. In the past, we would just have scaled up the instance, but I'm not sure this is best practice.

Here is a screenshot of our CPU utilization for the past 2 weeks at 1 hours intervals:

I'd love some advice on how best to host and serve this site!

Answer 1

At a quick glance, your best option for the least amount of effort is to add a CDN. Your top 7 longest loading assets are a couple js/css files and then some images - none of which seem large enough to be taking as long as they do. Use a tool like GTmetrix.com to see if you are utilizing the resources you have effectively before resizing your instance and/or DB.

Other options include utilizing AWS features like memcache (I tend to use redis), Autoscaling groups and RDS.