Features of Cloudways WordPress Hosting

• Unlimited websites.
• Vertical server scaling.
• Staging environments.
• Fast SSD storage.
• Global CDN network.
• Firewalls.
• SSL certificates.
• Daily backups.
• Live chat, email, and phone support.
• Customized control panel.
• Multiple cloud provider options.
• Advanced security measures.

A little bit more about the features

Cloudways is a website hosting service that stands out for its rich set of features, which are designed to make it easy for businesses to host and manage their websites. One of the standout features of Cloudways is the ability to host unlimited websites on a single account, a rare and valuable feature not offered by many competing hosting services.

In addition to unlimited websites, Cloudways also offers easy vertical Scaling, which means that the hosting infrastructure can be upgraded without interruption of service to meet the needs of your website as traffic increases. It ensures that your website will always be able to handle the increased load without any downtime.

Cloudways also offers staging environments, which allow you to test new features or changes to your website in a separate, isolated environment before pushing them live. This is an important feature for businesses that want to ensure the stability and integrity of their live website, as it allows you to safely test new changes without any risk of affecting the live site.

Overall, the features offered by Cloudways are competitive with other top hosting services and provide a lot of value for businesses of all sizes. Cloudways makes it easy to host and manage multiple websites, ensure that your website can handle traffic spikes, and provide a safe and stable environment for testing and development.

Performance of Cloudways WordPress Hosting

Performance is a critical factor to consider when choosing a website hosting service, and Cloudways delivers impressive performance across many key metrics.

One of the most important performance metrics for any web hosting service is uptime, and Cloudways has consistently delivered uptimes of 99.99% or higher. This means that customers can expect their websites to be available and accessible to visitors almost all of the time.

In addition to high uptimes, Cloudways also boasts fast loading times for websites hosted on its platform. This is achieved through a combination of optimized servers, fast SSD storage, and a global CDN network. These features work together to ensure that websites hosted on Cloudways load quickly and smoothly for visitors, no matter where they are located. You can also use their WordPress caching plugin Breeze to make your WordPress website load even faster.

Most tiers of Cloudways managed WordPress hosting include a premium object caching plugin for free; this is important, especially for the eCommerce websites running WooCommerce.

Security is also an important aspect of performance, and Cloudways takes it seriously. The service includes several security measures, such as firewalls, free SSL certificates, and daily backups to protect websites from potential threats.

Overall, the performance of Cloudways web hosting is excellent, with high uptimes, fast loading times, and strong security measures in place. These features combine to provide a reliable and enjoyable experience for website visitors and help to build trust and credibility for businesses that use Cloudways to host their websites.

Support offered by Cloudways

One of the key benefits of using Cloudways as a web hosting service is the high level of support that is available to customers. The company offers a variety of support options, including live chat, email, and phone support, so that customers can choose the best method for their needs and preferences.

In my experience, the live chat support offered by Cloudways is particularly helpful. Whenever I have had a question or issue, I have been able to get quick and helpful responses from the support team via live chat. The team is knowledgeable and has been able to resolve any issues I have had promptly.

Apart from live chat support, Cloudways also offers email and phone support. I have not had the need to use these support channels, but they are available for customers who prefer to communicate in these ways.

Overall, the support offered by Cloudways is excellent. The team is knowledgeable and responsive, providing various support options to meet the needs of different customers. I have been very happy with the support we have received from Cloudways and feel confident that I can get the help I need whenever I need it.

My experience and my client sites on Cloudways

I host most of the client websites on Cloudways since they offer the best value for money. Not that it has compromises, but it really achieves great results even with entry-level tiers of hosting service.

Suppose you have a relatively simple WordPress website. In that case, the entry-level tier with 1GB RAM starting at $12 per month is more than enough to load your website lightning fast, provided it is built to a standard and basic optimisation is done. For decent traffic and anything more than a calling card website, a 2GB RAM tier is a great option and should be a starting point. It can handle 1-5 WordPress installs with no issues (roughly combined traffic of 10.000 visitors per month).

For WooCommerce websites, I would recommend starting with a Cloudways WordPress hosting plan that offers a minimum of 4GB of RAM since WooCommerce needs it due to its dynamic nature of it.

Since they offer unlimited applications (WordPress installs, for example), you can host multiple websites on one server. In my experience, if you have low-traffic sites with no WooCommerce, you can run 10 websites on the second tier without issues. Again, providing no plugin overloads, bad code, basic website optimisations done, and the websites are running with no issues.

For the server provider, I use Cloudways WordPress hosting on VultrHF servers for most clients, as those proved to be the fastest loading in my experience. The Digital Ocean Performance series is also a great choice. There are rumours that VultrHF will stop getting new lines of servers soon, but that is not the issue since you can easily clone the server right from the user control panel to a new one with another provider.

There is a choice for Cloudways hosting providers between Amazon AWS or Google Cloud servers for large-scale websites. Those are pricey, and I use them if clients insist on them. They are more involved in managing.

Here is the client’s server example; it is the second tier with 2GB RAM / 1 CPU Core that is hosting 11 WordPress installs with relatively low traffic of 12k visitors per month.

And here is the GTMetrix test of one of the websites hosted on that server, Hello theme with Elementor website builder. Only image optimisation performed:

Conclusion

In conclusion, Cloudways is a top-performing web hosting service that offers a rich set of features, excellent performance, and reliable support. The ability to host unlimited websites, automatic scaling, and staging environments make it a valuable hosting solution for businesses of all sizes. The high uptimes, fast loading times, and strong security measures ensure that websites hosted on Cloudways are always available and perform well for visitors. And the knowledgeable and responsive support team is available to help customers whenever needed.

Overall, I highly recommend Cloudways WordPress hosting service. It delivers on its promises and provides a lot of value for its customers. Whether you are a small business owner, blogger, or developer, Cloudways is a great choice for hosting your website.

You can also check my list of best hosting providers.

Frequently asked questions

Exclusive offer for my visitors and customers

Since you came to the end of this pretty long article, here is the link to sign-up with Cloudways and get an exclusive discount for your new hosting account from Cloudways and me: Use this link for a signup, enter the coupon code RMWD20OFF, and you will get 20% off for the first two months.

If you are considering moving your current hosting to Cloudways and need help, Cloudways offers one free website migration. You can also hire me if you want someone to set a server up for you, tweak it for performance and migrate one or more websites.

Yes, it can be pretty frustrating for you and your visitors if your website is slow loading. As most of you know, Google started to take speed, specifically Core Web Vitals scores, into account when ranking mobile websites from May 2021 onwards, and the desktop scores are soon getting into account as well.

There is no need to despair as it is not too hard to make your website load fast, and here I will take you through the most common issues that affect the WordPress website speed and give you some pointers on how to fix them.

Currently, according to Core Web Vitals Technology Report, 35% of 2.35 million web pages pass the CWV criteria. Out of the total analyzed 1.9 mil pages on WordPress, 25.3% pass the Core Web Vitals. For WordPress websites, in January 2022, the median Lighthouse score is only 32%!

Table of contents

1. Keep your website updated
2. Slow hosting
   • Slow DNS
   • PHP Version
   • HTTP protocol
3. Caching
4. Using a CDN
5. One-fits-all theme
6. Unoptimized plugins
7. Unoptimized images
8. Large page size

1. Keep your website updated!

This is the most obvious one that most users overlook, WordPress website updates! Only 26.7% of WordPress core is updated and running the latest 5.7 version! 17.5% use previous WordPress version 5.6, while a staggering 55.8% of WordPress installs are using outdated versions. The same thing applies to your theme and plugins. It is important to keep everything updated for performance and security. If a theme or a plugin you are using has not been updated for a long time, you should consider replacing it with the more recent alternative.

2. Slow hosting – choosing a hosting relative to your website needs

This is where it all starts. It is a fact that over 85% of my client website optimization projects start with changing hosting and migrating the website. It is usually one of the biggest problems and solutions to slow-loading WordPress websites. The most obvious sign is the server response time and time to first byte (TTFB) scores. You can test them with various online tools like GTMetrix and ByteCheck. If you have an issue with your hosting, you can check my list of the fastest WordPress hosting companies that I recommend. Always get the best hosting package that you can comfortably afford, do note that expensive does not always necessarily mean good.

Slow DNS

Each time a visitor comes to your website, their browser needs to look up the DNS) to know the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the server where your website is located that your domain name points to.

Different DNS providers have different response times for resolving the IP address from a domain. A slow DNS provider will affect the overall speed, and most notably, the Time To First Byte (TTFB) metric.

There are a couple of consistently fast DNS providers, some are free, and some are paid. One of the best free ones is Cloudflare. Cloudflare is free for basic services, DNS, CDN, and WAF. You can use it for just DNS if you do not need the others. To do so, just set up Cloudflare and add your domain. After setting it up, you can pause Cloudflare services, but it will keep the DNS resolver. Some other fast DNS providers are Google Cloud DNS and Hurricane Electric.

PHP version

WordPress is written in PHP, so your server needs to have it installed to run your WordPress website. Like any other software, it is important to stay up to date. For both speed and security, always choose a hosting company that offers the latest PHP version. At the moment, the lowest version I use on client sites is 7.4, and it is the recommended one (used by 25.8% of WordPress installs), but also quite a few of the sites I manage are already running on PHP 8.0.3, which is the latest version as of 4 March 2021 (used by only 0.2% of WordPress installs).

PHP stands for “Hypertext Preprocessor.” It is a recursive acronym if you can understand what that means. PHP is an HTML-embedded Web scripting language used to build WordPress and Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

HTTP protocol

HTTP is an application protocol that is the standard for communication on the World Wide Web since its invention in 1989. First, you must have an SSL certificate and serve your website to visitors with a secure HTTPS protocol. The newest version of the SSL protocol is called TLS, and its latest version is 1.3. Transport Layer Security, or TLS, is a widely adopted security protocol designed to facilitate privacy and data security for communications over the Internet. A primary use case of TLS is encrypting the communication between web applications and servers, such as web browsers loading a website.

There are also a few versions of the HTTP protocol, the latest being HTTP/3. Although HTTP/2 is in use since 2015 and gives a significant boost in loading the websites by loading assets in parallel that is not possible with the previous version of HTTP/1.1, many web hosts are still not using it! The upcoming version HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a transport layer network protocol initially developed by Google. At the moment, only 7.32% of desktop web browsers support HTTP/3, while no mobile browsers support it. If a website is not served via secure protocol TLS (or SSL), only HTTP/1.1 can be used, meaning a slow-loading website.

The point to note is you must have an SSL certificate installed, use a secure TLS connection and serve your website to visitors with HTTPS secure protocol.

3. Caching

Caching is the term used for storing and reusing the website or application assets and elements to save server resources. It offers a better user experience. WordPress cache allows you to serve web content fast while keeping the server available to handle other requests.

There are several layers of caching your WordPress website. You can cache database queries, PHP-executed code, and whole-generated pages. The server handles the first two, and page caching is usually handled by a plugin that generates static pages from your WordPress content.

Caching pages is one of the most important ones as it speeds up loading times and reduces server resources needed for processing by serving finished static HTML pages to your visitors.

Some of the performance WordPress hosts implement page caching for you (like WPEngine and Kinsta), but you can also use free plugins for page caching on most hosts. Popular free plugins are WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache, and W3 Total Cache. From the premium plugins, I can highly recommend one that I use mostly, the WPRocket (use this link to get 20% OFF, not an affiliate link).

4. Using a CDN

CDN is a Content Delivery Network, essentially a network of servers worldwide used to store your website resources. I already mentioned using Cloudflare for DNS resolving, but you can also use it as a CDN to deliver your website content assets like images, CSS, and JS files from their servers worldwide. Why? So the files needed to display your webpage are downloaded by your visitors from the server closest to them, speeding up the load time by lowering the distance that data needs to be transferred. Physical distance affects the loading speed, and visitors worldwide will not have your website loading at the same speed.

The downside of free Cloudflare CDN is that it is not always using a server closest to your visitors to serve the files. To rectify that, you need to use a paid plan or another paid CDN provider like BunnyCDN or others.

Also note that if you have mainly local visitors and clients, you do not necessarily need a CDN and it can actually prove to load your website slower with it than without it. CDN is useful if you have global visitors.

5. One-fits-all theme

When starting a new website, one-fits-all themes seem great for beginners, but this can be an issue as most websites use only a fraction of the features from such themes. All the remaining features, not used, are still there, putting extra weight on your server resources and, in most cases, loading code for your visitors that is not needed. Top of all, it can cause WordPress performance issues.

This one is difficult to fix if you have a website with a lot of content since changing a theme can be costly and time-consuming. That is why you should carefully select a theme when starting. You can find some of the great choices on the resources page with the top 5 choices when choosing a fast-performing theme.

6. Unoptimized plugins

You should be careful when choosing the plugins you install and activate on the website. I mentioned before that any inactive plugins should be uninstalled as those can pose security risks. When choosing plugins, you should consider a few key points: how long has the plugin been in use, how many active installs it has, when was the last time it got updated, does a developer or company have experience and other plugins, how good is the support, is there a paid version of the plugin. Other than these factors, more in-depth analysis is for advanced users (developers) who can inspect the code execution, database queries, and database used by the plugin.

In general, I will repeat myself yet again, using as few plugins as possible to get the website working as you want it to. Concentrate on the main goal of starting and growing your website business with basics, and then gradually improve on it when the need arises. You do not need all the extra fancy features for your website that you or users will rarely use, if at all.

7. Unoptimized images

Images make the largest impact on design, but also on the loading speed. In my experience, optimizing images improves the loading speed and scores significantly. On average, images account for roughly 35% of page size on average, but for many websites, that percentage is even much more.

There are many image optimization plugins, but nothing beats the right image sizing and optimization before actually uploading the image to your website. You can use the simplest tools like IrfanView to resize and save the optimized images for the website.

Install both IrfanView and its plugins from this page. First, you need to know the image sizes used on your website; always use the largest dimensions that are actually used. Normally it is the 1920px max for hero full-width images, although most will look great at the size 1280px as well. When you resize the image, save it for the web with jpeg quality 82, or you can even try 71, which works for most images without degrading the looks. Do not use PNG or GIF formats. PNG is ok sometimes for monotone images or drawings, but in most cases, JPG is the smallest. For optimizing images on your WordPress website, use a plugin EWWW Image Optimizer or services like EWWW Cloud and Imagify.

Secondly, you should create a webp version of the images and serve those to the modern browsers that support the new image format. For this, you can use a plugin that will help and save a lot of work, like WebP Express.

If you have a lot of images, you might consider lazy loading them. This is an optimization technique that loads visible images but delays the downloading and rendering of images that appear below the fold. WordPress, as of 5.5, has a native lazy loading feature as well and is lazy loading images by default.

6. Large page size

Many times I get clients that have pages that are 5-10+MB in size. This is the amount of information a visitor browser needs to download in order to display the page to the visitor. Limiting the size to as low an amount of data as possible is the goal here.

The first web page appeared in 1990. Adding all sorts of fonts, images, videos, and CSS / JS files to the websites and with years of tech development, the sizes of pages have significantly increased. In 2010, the median web page size was 702kb and in February 2022 it is 2385kb, while the 90 percentile of web pages is 8469kb in size, according to information provided by httparchive.org.

The goal should be to have web pages as light as possible, hopefully well under the 2000kb (2MB) range.

Need your WordPress website optimized?

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – this should be under 2.5 seconds
• First Input Delay (FID) – this should be under 100 milliseconds
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – should be below 0.1

These three metrics should be under recommended values for at least 75% of page loads for mobile and desktop devices.

Core Web Vitals basics

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures when the largest content element in the viewport becomes visible, meaning what you see on the screen when a web page loads without scrolling. Google considers an LCP under 2.5 seconds to be fast, while an LCP of over 4 seconds is bad.

The most common causes of a poor LCP are:

• Slow server response times
• Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS
• Slow resource load times
• Client-side rendering

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (when they click a link, tap on a button, or use a custom, JavaScript-powered control) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. To provide a good user experience, sites should strive to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds, while an FID of more than 300 milliseconds is considered bad.

The First Input Delay is measured only for ‘field data‘ and is available in Google Search Console. When testing pages with Lighthouse tools, to help predict FID look at Total Blocking Time (TBT), which measures different things, but improvements in TBT usually correspond to improvements in FID. The main cause of a poor FID is heavy JavaScript execution.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the unexpected layout shift that occurs during the page load. A layout shift occurs whenever a visible element changes its position from one rendered frame to the next. Ideally, this should be under 0.1. Scores over 0.25 are considered a poor user experience.

The most common causes of poor CLS are:

• Images without dimensions
• Ads, embeds, and iframes without dimensions
• Dynamically injected content
• Web Fonts causing FOIT/FOUT
• Actions waiting for a network response before updating DOM

Measuring Core Web Vitals

To measure Core Web Vitals, you can use the following online tools that use the Google Lighthouse tool for testing; PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest.org, GTMetrix, Google Search Console, and web.dev’s measure tool. If you are using Chrome or Edge browsers, you can also install the Web Vitals Chrome extension or use the inbuilt Lighthouse tool within Chrome DevTools for in-browser testing. All these tools, except for the Google Search Console, give you so-called ‘lab data’ while the GSC will give you ‘field data’ scores (actual user experience while loading and interacting with the web pages) relevant to SEO. Please note that Google Search Console ‘field data‘ is available only if you have enough website visitors.

Other Web Vitals

First contentful paint (FCP): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when any part of the page’s content is shown on the screen. Essentially this is when the user perceives the site as starting to load. Ideally, we want this under 1.5 seconds as that is perceived as fast by users.

To improve First Contentful Paint in general:

• Eliminate render-blocking resources
• Minify CSS
• Remove unused CSS
• Preconnect to required origins
• Reduce server response times (TTFB)
• Avoid multiple-page redirects
• Preload key requests
• Avoid enormous network payloads
• Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
• Avoid an excessive DOM size
• Minimize critical request depth
• Ensure text remains visible during the Webfont load
• Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small.

Time to Interactive (TTI): measures the time from when the page starts loading to when it’s visually rendered, its initial scripts (if any) have loaded, and it’s capable of reliably responding to user input quickly.

To improve Time To Interactive in general:

• Minify JavaScript
• Preconnect to required origins
• Preload key requests
• Reduce the impact of third-party code
• Minimize critical request depth
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• Minimize main thread work
• Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small.

Total blocking time (TBT):  measures the total amount of time between First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI), essentially the amount of time where the website is not responding to user input or commands. Lower is always better here; ideally, we want this under 300ms when measured on the mobile device.

To improve Total Blocking Time in general:

• Reduce the impact of third-party code
• Reduce JavaScript execution time
• Minimize main thread work
• Keep request counts low, and transfer sizes small

Other metrics when testing the speed of web pages

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is how quickly the web server starts sending data. It should typically be 0.1-0.2 in the country the site is hosted in and 0.2-0.5 internationally. Higher than this is likely a problem. FAST is consistently 0.1 or below.

Fully Loaded Time is when the Document Complete or Window Loaded event has been reached, AND the site has had no network activity for 2+ seconds. This metric can be misleading as even small amounts of marketing code can make this really high. The difference between this timing and Document Complete Time is usually how long it takes for your third-party code like Analytics, Affiliate Code & Ads, and Facebook Pixels to load.

Further reading related to Core Web Vitals

• Common WordPress performance issues to improve Core Web Vitals
• Cloudways WordPress hosting review

I am a Codeable WordPress Expert, meaning I completed a thorough vetting process to join the community as one of the top 2% of WordPress developers in the world!

Apart from being a part of this amazing community of experts since July 2020., I have been making websites since I bought my first domain name in 1998. Working with WordPress for over 14 years now, building websites from scratch and making them load fast even before fast loading became important and a buzz.

Why I take my work to Codeable?

I have been developing mainly WordPress websites over the last 14 years as a freelance developer as a side job, most of my work was coming in through word-of-mouth and regular clients. During the notorious COVID19 outbreak and lockdown I needed a new steady inflow of new clients since my main business at the time went down to zero. I have been trying platforms like Upwork, Freelancer, and similar to reach clients. All of those were basically a complete waste of time, to get a project was near to impossible since those platforms are overcrowded with developers, not even mentioning the price dumping involved to get the project. This is not something I wanted, since it gives no quality work if you lower the price and quickly just produce ‘something’, both I and more important, clients will not be happy. It made no sense and I quickly gave up.

When I found out about Codeable, the first thing that came to my mind after reading about their vetting process was, “am I good enough?” After trying to find out about the platform and reading about experiences, I decided to apply – and here I am, proud, happy, and grateful to be part of the amazing Codeable community of top developers in the WordPress sphere. The application process took almost two months, from the application, interviews, test project development, live coding interview, onboarding. But it was a life-changing experience since then, for much better of course!

Top benefits of Codeable platform

The only global WordPress freelance marketplace with pre-vetted WordPress experts.

• Focused on WordPress exclusively
• Strictly vetted WordPress experts only
• No bidding pricing system
• Free to post a project and get an estimate
• No obligation to hire
• Quality and satisfaction guarantee
• The 28-day warranty period for bug fixing
• Always-there customer support
• The community of experts, not competition
• A purpose over profit business

Top benefits for clients

• Get reliable, pre-vetted WordPress experts that will deliver even when it’s urgent
• Have virtually any WordPress-related task solved
• Build lasting relationships with developers that know their business
• Focus on scaling the business, not their WordPress website

Read more here on how Codeable works.

Top benefits for developers

• The amazing community behind the scenes, ready to help each other at any time
• Coaching, support & professional development
• No competition between the developers, only coopetition
• New client onboarding
• A streamlined process for correspondence with clients, all in one place
• Guaranteed minimum hourly rates
• Escrow service for payments, projects are funded up-front, and payment is released to developers when the client approves

Are you a WordPress expert developer? Apply here!
Be sure to drop me a line and I can get you to the top of the cue.

Since there was no plugin for a hamburger-style mobile menu for the Genesis framework, I decided to make one for my sites. You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository.
Also in the plugin, you have the option to make navigation sticky to the top when a visitor scrolls down the page for x amount of pixels. You can choose either the primary or secondary Genesis menu to become sticky.

How to use Google web fonts on a website

These examples use Google web fonts API, the obvious advantage is that anyone can use them, they are hosted by Google thus available to everyone and their use is cross-browser compatible. To use them on your site you have three options:

1. Standard HTML meta tag to put in the head of your HTML documents

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

2. CSS @import to put in your style.css file

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster);

3. JavaScript for asynchronous loading

<script type="text/javascript">
WebFontConfig = {
google: { families: [ 'Lobster::latin' ] }
};
(function() {
var wf = document.createElement('script');
wf.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https' : 'http') + '://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js';
wf.type = 'text/javascript';
wf.async = 'true';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(wf, s);
})(); </script>

After you have done with the three methods above, you use the font in CSS like you would normally use any standard font.

font-family: 'Lobster', cursive;

So what do you say about it?

I’m really into web design typography lately, how about you? What are your thoughts on it? Do you already use custom fonts for web design, or you still hang on to images.

Here are some photos of my Honda NC700X DCT and few stock photos by Honda

Enhanced WordPress Gallery plugin is a simple plugin that changes the core WordPress gallery shortcode to display all image properties, namely, it displays Title, Caption, and Description of the image if those fields are entered for images in native WordPress media management. Just download the plugin zip file and upload it to /wp-content/plugins/ directory of your WP installation. Go to dashboard/plugins and activate the plugin. That is all, no options to configure, no overhead code. If an image has any of the fields, the plugin will just display them under the image.

Enhanced WordPress Gallery plugin I made after the attempt to use original WordPress gallery shortcode to create galleries and integrate Paypal shopping cart (using WP simple Paypal shopping cart plugin). I needed to somehow display a shortcode to add the buy button. This way I can use one of the default media library fields to insert the shortcode. This plugin adds a gallery display for all image info, title, alt, caption, and description.
Also if you want to use the fancy box (I recommend using Fancybox for WordPress) or some other lightbox effect on images, you will need to add this bit of code to your template functions file insert needed class elements for the effect to function (I intend to incorporate this into a plugin in next version as a simple checkbox option). What this function does is it just adds classes to the link needed for the fancy box to work.

function add_class_attachment_link($html){
$postid = get_the_ID();
$html = str_replace('<a','<a class="fancybox" rel="gallerygroup"', $html);
return $html;
}
add_filter('wp_get_attachment_link','add_class_attachment_link',10,1);

If you are using some other lightbox library just change the class names on line 3.

class="fancybox" rel="gallerygroup"

This is how the gallery is displayed:

This is a work in progress, as I intend to add a plugin options page and include extra functionality found on my website photo galleries.
You can download the plugin here: Enhanced WordPress Gallery
If you find this plugin useful, feel free to buy me a coffee