Thanks for letting us know, Diana! We’ve been chatting about replacing Super Cache + Autoptimize as our recommended free option with W3 Total Cache. I’ve now done that – give it a try!

This option isn’t available. Recommendations?

Hey Jesse,

Try this out:

location @apache_fallback {
proxy_pass $ws_proxy_url;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
access_log off;
}
try_files /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$cache_uri/index-https.html $uri @apache_fallback;


Thanks for this post / info! I am trying to set this up on a plesk server with WP Super Cache, but the nginx directives don’t seem to be correct now (2022). I found if I change the last block from index.hmtl to index-https.html (ie. includes the request scheme) that it will serve the man homepage (the only cached page currently):

try_files /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$cache_uri/index-https.html $uri /index.php;

However any page which is not cached, or all pages without that change, fall through to index.php and it actually sends the contents of index.php (ie. php code), it does not pass the request to the php handler (using php-fpm). Similarly in the wp-admin backend, any requests just send tools.php, options.php, etc.

Thanks for any tips….

Jesse

Hey Joël, thanks for the comments and server logs! Try replacing the location ~ / block with this version and let me know the results.
“`
location ~ / {
try_files /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$cache_uri/index.html $uri /index.php;
}
“`

Hi Jordan! I’m experiencing the same problem as Ryan. These are my logs for when I load the code: https://bit.ly/30Tw9hF
Even if the NGINX-part of Wp Super Cache doesn’t work I’m very impressed with the better performance of my sites 😉

Hey Ryan,
Thanks for the feedback! I’ve corrected that part of the guide: the “Additional nginx directives” under Apache & nginx settings is the right place. After you add it, what specifically do the logs say is the reason for the 403?

Firstly thanks for the great post.

In Plesk Onyx/Obsidian where exactly should the code in point 8 be added?
I cannot find the “Web Server Settings” or an “Advanced Field”

If I add it to “Apache & nginx Settings” in the bottom Additional nginx directives section the website immediately shows a 403 error.

Am I doing something wrong?

Hey Sarang, yes we’ve found WP Rocket to be the best balance of effectiveness, simplicity, and power. Google’s algorithm does indeed still appear to take site speed into account, though I would take their PageSpeed results with a grain of salt. I think regardless of what benchmarking tool you use, the TTFB for your target geographic market is going to be your most important metric on which everything else is laid atop. Ensuring that at bare minimum you’ve got a fast web server working in tandem with static file output to serve your compressed index HTML file, you should be able to reach avg 100ms TTFB; and that is an excellent baseline on which the rest of the site’s resources will be loaded. If you don’t have that baseline, ignore everything else and make that happen first.

Kevin,

Honestly we’ve just been using the if statement on all our sites! I tried switching back and forth and running speed tests and the difference never showed itself. I suppose it would actually be in terms of CPU usage on the server side, but even that hasn’t presented issues on shared hosting.

thanks for this great tutorial.

If i use the code to avoid if statements for performance the /wp-admin link gets too many redirections.

With the if statement everything works fine.

Can you help me with that?

Thanks
Kevin

That does make sense! HTTP authentication either manually configured or using Plesk probably only gets set up via .htaccess file or specific apache config file, which is not read by nginx. While I haven’t tested this, a quick check of the nginx documentation indicates that the following should work. Add it to the same place you put the nginx supercache config:

auth_basic “Restricted”;
auth_basic_user_file {PATH_TO_.htpasswd};

Note that you have to include the path to your .htpasswd file that was set up to work with Apache. If you created it through Plesk, then the path to the .htpasswd file should be located within the apache config file for the domain here:

/var/www/vhosts/system/{DOMAIN}/conf/last_httpd.conf

Open up that file and look for a reference to .htpasswd — copy the directory path and use it in the nginx code above. Any remaining issues would have to be permission related.

All that said… if you DID create your http authentication via Plesk, you should let them know that they’re not configuring nginx at the same time, as this should be up to them to do!

Thanks

Renzo,

It looks like you need to install a custom build of nginx that supports it. They have the details in the URL you provided under the header “Check if your nginx has fastcgi_cache_purge module”. If you can’t find a custom build for your OS (looks like they only support Ubuntu / Debian) you can probably do a custom recompile, but that’s something we tend to avoid with production servers.

set $skip_cache 0;

# POST requests and urls with a query string should always go to PHP
if ($request_method = POST) {
set $skip_cache 1;
}
if ($query_string != “”) {
set $skip_cache 1;
}

# Don’t cache uris containing the following segments
if ($request_uri ~* “/wp-admin/|/xmlrpc.php|wp-.*.php|/feed/|index.php|sitemap(_index)?.xml”) {
set $skip_cache 1;
}

# Don’t use the cache for logged in users or recent commenters
if ($http_cookie ~* “comment_author|wordpress_[a-f0-9]+|wp-postpass|wordpress_no_cache|wordpress_logged_in”) {
set $skip_cache 1;
}

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

location ~ .php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

fastcgi_cache_bypass $skip_cache;
fastcgi_no_cache $skip_cache;

fastcgi_cache WORDPRESS;
fastcgi_cache_valid 60m;
}

location ~ /purge(/.*) {
fastcgi_cache_purge WORDPRESS “$scheme$request_method$host$1”;
}

location ~* ^.+.(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|rss|atom|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
access_log off; log_not_found off; expires max;
}

location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location ~ /. { deny all; access_log off; log_not_found off; }
}

I get this error : Invalid nginx configuration: nginx: [emerg] unknown directive “fastcgi_cache_purge” in /var/www/vhosts/system/masnoticia.com/conf/vhost_nginx.conf:38 nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test fail

How can I make it work?

Thanks Ben! Spurred by your comment, I updated it today to quickly indicate that I’ve been testing out the “Better WordPress Minify” plugin for the last couple of months. So far so good, though I find in general it’s tricky to get minification working with everything (like Google seems to really want). This is partly because of their new CSS inlining requirements and mostly thanks to them wanting to force all Javascript to the footer, even if it uses document.onload.

I found this tutorial a big help but after all implementing the guide, i found out that WP Minify isnt working. but then again the guide gives me a +5 on google speed

Thanks Kingsley!

Thanks

I was serching for a way to enable this with ssh but
unfortunatly my host do not let me in as admin.

It was so easy, thank you 🙂

My pagespeed over google insights went from 33 to 75