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Performance Browser Caching Hummingbird Pro

I am using Hummingbird Pro in my Multisite Network to check and enhance sites performance.

I have also enabled Browser Caching with resources expiry set to 8 days in cloudflare as recommended in the plugin settings.

It is working fine for main site in multisite.

But this effect is not showing in sub sites.

When I test performance of sub site, it shows that images and other resources expiry is not specified.

Please explain how to resolve this.

Thanks

Thu, 9 Aug 2018 9:47:06
  • Adam Czajczyk
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Peter Aldred,

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    You mentioned that you have applied compression settings to CloudFlare via Hummingbird. Is your CloudFlare instance server entire multisite or just a main domain?

    My point is: I don’t know whether the site in question is a sub-folder or sub-domain install. In case of sub-folder install (so sub-sites are like “yoursite.com/sub-site”:wink: CloudFlare would cover entire network by default and in that case these settings should be actually applied everywhere. However, if it’s a sub-domain install (so sub-sites are like “subsite.yoursite.com”:wink: then – in case of CloudFlare integration – that might depend on CloudFlare settings. If the CloudFlare is not set to cover all the sub-domains that would be applied, on CloudFlare end, only to those that are served via CloudFlare.

    That said, would you please shed some light on the setup, regarding remarks above? That would help me diagnose the issue and look for solution.

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • Peter Aldred
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Thanks for support.

    Multisite network has one main site and other sites are added as Alias domains of the main site.

    I have set Browser Caching expiry to 8 days in main site as well as sub sites in cloudflare.

    All the sites are added individually in cloudflare and all have their own settings from where I changed Browser Caching expiry to 8 days.

    I have not connected cloudflare through API in Hummingbird Pro.

    So, I have site1.com as main site which shows correct browser caching expiry as set in cloudflare.

    site2.com as Alias and sub site of site1.com which is not showing correct expiry of cached resources.

    So I am not getting how to resolve this.

    Thanks

  • Adam Czajczyk
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Peter Aldred,

    Thank you for your response.

    In this case, there is also a chance that it’s a “false alarm”. I don’t know those “alias domains” and sub-sites so I can’t check it from outside but you should be able to confirm that using Google PageSpeed insight and https://www.giftofspeed.com/cache-checker/

    You should use both these tools because used alone none of them is giving a “100% clear” result.

    To check this, first check these sub-subsite with PageSpeed Insights and see if it suggests to “leverage browser caching”. If yes, see what exact resources it suggests to cache as this is something that also is often “misleading”. Then check the very same with the other service.

    If both services confirm for cached mime types for local (as in “local to your site”:wink: resources that there’s no caching, then we’ll need to investigate it further.

    If PageSpeed doesn’t even suggest to leverage browser caching, that means that it’s indeed a “false alarm”.

    If PageSpeed does suggest to leverage browser caching but the other tool doesn’t, then this would mean that caching itself is probably enabled but there might be some additional tweaks/server side changes needed or that those non-cached resources are not local to your site and cannot be changed but everything else is – so that’s fine; that would be reported also by Hummingbird but more as an information rather than suggestion (as you can’t affect external resources without either downloading and serving them from your server or using some sort of proxy).

    Would you please do such test and let me know about results?

    Best regards,

    Adam

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Peter,

    I had a look at the subsite in question and I can see the issue there.

    The thing here is that Browser Caching is usually one stop setup when it comes to multisites, it adds browser caching in your .htaccess file and affects entire network, since there are no .htaccess files for each subsite.

    So what happens here is that Cloudflare is taking care of browser caching of your subsites and for some reason it doesn’t apply the rules to subsite domains, and that’s something Cloudflare should be able to help you with.

    What you can try from Hummingbird is to connect Cloudflare API in browser caching panel but if that doesn’t help Cloudflare would need to check this out further and see why subsite domains aren’t getting proper results in speed test.

    Best regards,

    Predrag