My NGinx configuration files. In no means the perfect setup. /etc/nginx/nginx.conf is the main conf file.

common.conf

# Global configuration file.
# ESSENTIAL : Configure Nginx Listening Port
#listen 127.0.0.1:8080;
listen 80;

# ESSENTIAL : Default file to serve. If the first file isn't found
index index.php index.html index.htm;

# ESSENTIAL : no favicon logs
location = /favicon.ico {
    log_not_found off;
    access_log off;
}

# ESSENTIAL : robots.txt
location = /robots.txt {
    allow all;
    log_not_found off;
    access_log off;
}

# ESSENTIAL : Configure 404 Pages
error_page 404 /404.html;

# ESSENTIAL : Configure 50x Pages
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
    root /usr/share/nginx/www;
}

# SECURITY : Deny all attempts to access hidden files .abcde
location ~ /\. {
    deny all;
}

# Set expires to year on static file types
location ~* ^.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|gz|svg|svgz|ttf|otf|woff|eot|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm)$ {
    expires    365d;
    #root       /sites/example.com/public;
    access_log off;
}

# Cache control recommended by google
#location ~* \.js$ {
#    add_header Cache-Control public;
#    add_header Vary Accept-Encoding;
#    #expires 1d;
#}

nginx.conf

# Based on this:
# https://github.com/darktable/html5-boilerplate-server-configs

# Set another default user than root for security reasons
user www-data;

# As a thumb rule: One per CPU. If you are serving a large amount
# of static files, which requires blocking disk reads, you may want
# to increase this from the number of cpu_cores available on your
# system.
#
# The maximum number of connections for Nginx is calculated by:
# max_clients = worker_processes * worker_connections
worker_processes 1;

# Maximum file descriptors that can be opened per process
# This should be > worker_connections
worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;

events {
    # When you need > 8000 * cpu_cores connections, you start optimizing
    # your OS, and this is probably the point at where you hire people
    # who are smarter than you, this is *a lot* of requests.
    worker_connections 8000;

    # This sets up some smart queueing for accept(2)'ing requests
    # Set it to "on" if you have > worker_processes
    accept_mutex off;

    # This was in the original config file
    # multi_accept on;

    # These settings are OS specific, by defualt Nginx uses select(2),
    # however, for a large number of requests epoll(2) and kqueue(2)
    # are generally faster than the default (select(2))
    # use epoll; # enable for Linux 2.6+
    # use kqueue; # enable for *BSD (FreeBSD, OS X, ..)
}

# Change these paths to somewhere that suits you!
error_log  logs/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

http {

    # Set the mime-types via the mime.types external file
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;

    # And the fallback mime-type
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    # Format for our log files
    log_format   main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  $status '
        '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
        '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    # Log
    #access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    # ~2 seconds is often enough for HTML/CSS, but connections in
    # Nginx are cheap, so generally it's safe to increase it
    keepalive_timeout  5;

     # You usually want to serve static files with Nginx
    sendfile on;

    tcp_nopush on; # off may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff
    tcp_nodelay on; # on may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff

    # Enable Gzip
    gzip              on;
    # http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5131916/how-to-deflate-js-file-in-nginx
    gzip_http_version 1.1;
    # http://phrogz.net/effects-of-gzip_comp_level-on-html
    gzip_comp_level   6;
    gzip_min_length   20;
    # Set to be high
    gzip_buffers      16 8k;
    # https://github.com/darktable/html5-boilerplate-server-configs/blob/master/nginx.conf
    gzip_proxied      any;
    gzip_types
        # text/html is always compressed by HttpGzipModule
        text/css
        text/javascript
        text/x-javascript
        text/xml
        text/plain
        text/x-component
        application/javascript
        application/x-javascript
        application/json
        application/xml
        application/rss+xml
        font/truetype
        font/opentype
        application/vnd.ms-fontobject
        image/svg+xml;
    gzip_static        on;
    gzip_disable       "MSIE [1-6]\.";
    gzip_vary          on;
    # End the html5 boilerplate rules here

    # Begin the default nginx conf
    types_hash_max_size 2048;
    server_tokens off;

    server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
    # server_name_in_redirect off;

    ##
    # Virtual Host Configs
    ##

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

    fastcgi_buffers 8 16k;
    fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;
    fastcgi_connect_timeout 300;
    fastcgi_send_timeout 300;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
}

wordpress.conf

# WORDPRESS : Rewrite rules, sends everything through index.php and keeps the appended query string intact
location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}

# SECURITY : Deny all attempts to access PHP Files in the uploads directory
location ~* /(?:uploads|files)/.*\.php$ {
    deny all;
}

# REQUIREMENTS : Enable PHP Support
location ~ \.php$ {

    # SECURITY : Zero day Exploit Protection
    try_files $uri =404;

    # ENABLE : Enable PHP, listen fpm sock
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
}

# PLUGINS : Enable Rewrite Rules for Yoast SEO SiteMap
rewrite ^/sitemap_index\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=1 last;
rewrite ^/([^/]+?)-sitemap([0-9]+)?\.xml$ /index.php?sitemap=$1&sitemap_n=$2 last;