Best AWS EC2 Instance for WordPress

For nearly every WordPress site — personal blog, small business, even most ecommerce stores — **t4g.small** at $0.0168/hr (~$12/mo) is more than enough capacity. WordPress's performance bottleneck isn't typically CPU; it's the database query waterfall on uncached pages. Once you have full-page caching working correctly (either Cloudflare in front or a plugin like LiteSpeed Cache or WP Rocket), the EC2 instance is mostly serving cached HTML and almost never under load.

Graviton (ARM64) is fully production-ready for WordPress in 2026. PHP, MariaDB/MySQL, nginx, and all major caching layers (Redis, Memcached) ship arm64 binaries. Every popular plugin and theme is pure PHP and runs identically on any architecture. The price advantage over t3 or t3a is meaningful and pure savings.

Two non-obvious decisions matter more than the instance size: page caching configuration and asset hosting. For caching, use Cloudflare's cache-everything rule on your static assets and uncached HTML for logged-in users — that's almost always the right setup for a non-membership site. For assets, move uploads to S3 with CloudFront via the WP Offload Media plugin so you're not running out of EBS volume and you get global edge delivery.

Resist the urge to upgrade the instance when traffic grows; instead, measure where the actual bottleneck is. WordPress's "I need a bigger server" reflex is rarely correct. The right fix is usually "I need a faster cache hit rate" or "I need fewer database queries per page" — both of which are configuration changes, not infrastructure changes. The "scale" tier (t4g.large) becomes justified when you have authenticated users, real-time features, or e-commerce flows that genuinely can't be cached.