These interests are the main reasons for many blog authors to switch to static site generators like Jekyll or Hugo. Performance and security is always a thing you should be aware of when hosting a website, but I am feeling comfortable with the WordPress right now and my guest authors like to write posts with the Gutenberg editor as well. After reading a post by Delicious Brains about their suggestion in caching WordPress by directly serving cached html files with Nginx before running PHP, I started to improve my setup by something similar with WP-Super-Cache.
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
include /etc/nginx/inc.d/php.conf;
include /etc/nginx/inc.d/caching.conf;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
access_log off;
location = /favicon.ico {
log_not_found off;
access_log off;
}
location = /robots.txt {
log_not_found off;
access_log off;
allow all;
}
# WP Super Cache rules.
set $cache_uri $request_uri;
# POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
if ($request_method = POST) {
set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
if ($query_string != "") {
set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
# Don't cache uris containing the following segments
if ($request_uri ~* "(/wp-admin/|/xmlrpc.php|/wp-(app|cron|login|register|mail).php|wp-.*.php|/feed/|index.php|wp-comments-popup.php|wp-links-opml.php|wp-locations.php|sitemap(_index)?.xml|[a-z0-9_-]+-sitemap([0-9]+)?.xml)") {
set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
# Don't use the cache for logged in users or recent commenters
if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-9]+|wp-postpass|wordpress_logged_in") {
set $cache_uri 'null cache';
}
# We only listen to https (index-https.html). For http use: index.html
set $cache_file "/wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host$cache_uri/index-https.html";
# Use cached or actual file if they exists, otherwise pass request to WordPress
location / {
# If we add index.php?$args its break WooCommerce like plugins # Ref: #330
try_files $cache_file $uri $uri/ /index.php;
}
# uncomment to get cache file as header for debugging
# add_header X-Cache-File $cache_file;
https://wordpress.org/support/article/nginx/#wp-super-cache-rules
Benchmarks
With WP-Sucher-Cache only:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1807734 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.zahnarzt-bracke.de (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Completed 10000 requests
Finished 10000 requests
Server Software: nginx
Server Hostname: www.zahnarzt-bracke.de
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,4096,128
TLS Server Name: www.zahnarzt-bracke.de
Document Path: /
Document Length: 23657 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 189.528 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 238650000 bytes
HTML transferred: 236570000 bytes
Requests per second: 52.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1895.276 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 18.953 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1229.67 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 104 1024 317.8 1015 4142
Processing: 140 863 361.8 783 4208
Waiting: 38 729 319.8 663 2866
Total: 499 1887 447.0 1838 6282
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1838
66% 1993
75% 2102
80% 2181
90% 2425
95% 2674
98% 3026
99% 3351
100% 6282 (longest request)
With WP-Super-Cache and Nginx try_files combo:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1807734 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
Benchmarking www.zahnarzt-bracke.de (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Completed 10000 requests
Finished 10000 requests
Server Software: nginx
Server Hostname: www.zahnarzt-bracke.de
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1.2,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,4096,128
TLS Server Name: www.zahnarzt-bracke.de
Document Path: /
Document Length: 23657 bytes
Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 119.667 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Total transferred: 238470000 bytes
HTML transferred: 236570000 bytes
Requests per second: 83.57 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 1196.666 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 11.967 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1946.08 [Kbytes/sec] received
Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 110 860 383.1 808 6969
Processing: 62 332 185.2 288 2479
Waiting: 24 228 156.2 197 1827
Total: 269 1192 434.0 1128 7222
Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 1128
66% 1257
75% 1353
80% 1425
90% 1674
95% 1965
98% 2463
99% 2811
100% 7222 (longest request)
Conclusion
I am not quite sure if this helped anyway, but even the idea of serving already existing static html files directly with Nginx feels good …
Real static page
If you want to bring this idea even further, you should probably check out this little plugin: Simple-static