Version 3.2 of our Servebolt Optimizer plugin introduces a couple of improvements. You can read more about the impact of this release in our 3.2 announcement post on our main site.
Menu cache performance
Loading menus is something that is done on almost any site. They are, however, almost always generated on the fly. Wouldn’t it be great if you could cache them? Using the latest version of our plugin, the Servebolt Optimizer, allows you to do just that! By caching the menu items you can decrease the Time To First Byte by several milliseconds, even if there are only a few items in your menu.
Translation performance
If you choose to use a translated version of WordPress that’s completely understandable. After all: you want your site in the native language of your intended audience. But this comes with a slight downside. Each time your site gets loaded, the translation files need to be loaded as well.
In our latest version of the Servebolt Optimizer WordPress plugin, we’ve added a feature known as the Translation Loader Performance. Using this, the plugin allows you to cache the content of the translation files, shaving off precious time when loading your site.
Full changelog
Improved automated cache purging – The automatic cache purge has been improved, primarily in 3 areas. Whenever a post/term gets deleted then the cache gets purged. Whenever an attachment gets updated (resized, cropped etc.) we purge cache for URLs, including all image sizes if the attachment is an image. Whenever a post gets excluded from the HTML Cache (formerly Full Page Cache) then we also purge cache.
Custom cache TTL per post type – One can now control the cache TTL (time-to-live) per post type. This allows for more fine-grained cache control.
More fine-grained access control to cache purge feature – Previously only administrators could purge cache. This is now changed using more fine-grained capability checks – administrators and editors can now purge cache, while authors can purge cache for their own posts. Contributors and subscribers cannot purge cache.
Better Jetpack compatibility – Previously the Jetpack Site Accelerator was in conflict with Servebolt’s Accelerated Domains. This is now fixed with Site Accelerator being disabled whenever Accelerated Domains or Accelerated Domains Image Resize-feature is active.
Menu cache performance feature – We’ve added a new performance enhancing feature – WordPress menu cache. This usually decreases TTFB with several milliseconds, even for menus with few items. The feature also includes automatic cache purge whenever a menu gets updated.
Translation loader performance feature – We’ve added a new performance enhancing feature – improved WordPress translations file loader. Whenever WordPress loads the translations from MO-files this causes a lot disk I/O. This feature will cache the MO-file using transients which in return decreases the loading time.
We’ve released version 32.2 of our Control Panel which introduces support for customers to change the PHP timezone to something other than UTC. You can find the new setting on the Site Settings page
We launched our new login experience, and strengthened our password requirements. Passwords now need to have a minimum length of 8 characters, and contain both lowercase and uppercase letters as well as at least one digit.
All customers who created their accounts before the introduction of these new rules must reset their password, whether or not their old password already met those requirements.
We updated our Servebolt Optimizer plugin to include our Image Resize add-on for Accelerated Domains and some additional features.
Accelerated Domains Image Resizing – This version introduces a new feature: Accelerated Domains Image Resizing. This feature will resize, optimize metadata, and cache your images on the fly. Improving load time and enhancing the user experience.
PHP version constraint – We have changed the required PHP version from 7 to 7.3. This means that whenever the plugin is activated in an environment running less than PHP version 7.3, the plugin will show an admin notice in WP Admin indicating the need to upgrade to be able to used the plugin.
Yoast SEO Premium – automatic cache purge for redirects. Whenever you add or remove a redirect in Yoast SEO Premium, the plugin will now purge the cache for the given URLs. This is useful since otherwise one would potentially need to manually purge these URLs after adding or removing a redirect.
Added CDN cache control header – We have now added a new header (CDN-Cache-Control) that allows for more fine grained control over the cache feature in the CDN-nodes.
Improved WP Rocket compatibility – We’ve improved the compatibility with WP Rocket’s cache feature so that it will not interfere with the cache feature of Servebolt Optimizer.
The feature to exclude posts from cache was broken due to wrong order in conditions in the cache header logic. This is now fixed.
Removed priority-attribute from plugin static asset actions
Due to cases of incompatibility between themes and other plugins we removed the priority-attribute from the actions that enqueued the plugins static assets. This means that the priority-attribute falls back to the default value of 10 which should be less likely to cause issue.
Resolved issue with single file composer packages not being included in autoloader
Certain packages were not included in the Composer autoloader due to an issue in Mozart (which was needed to resolve conflicts between composer packages used in WordPress plugins). The packages originated as dependencies of the Servebolt PHP SDK, and was solved by specifically including them in the plugins composer-file. The affected packages contained polyfills for the PHP functions http_build_query and getallheaders which means that this was only an issue in environment where these functions were not available in PHP.
Today we rolled out a new version of Accelerated Domains, with full support for Vipps Checkout in WooCommerce. This means that Accelerated Domains now supports all current Vipps Checkout methods, including express checkout.
Please get in touch with our support if you experience any issues with Accelerated Domains.
Accelerated Domains has been updated to better handle search spam. This type of spam is growing and growing in the amount of requests we see. Accelerated Domains has already blocked over 100 000 search requests identified as spam.
We do this by blocking some search string queries usually identifying search spam.
If you identify any issues, please get in touch with our support.
As of today, we’ve discontinued the Starter and Starter Pro plans as part of our offering. If you currently have a Starter or Starter Pro subscription you can continue to use those.
The Starter plan and the Starter Pro plan are now part of our archived legacy plans. This means the Starter and Starter Pro plan are no longer available to select when downgrading or creating a Bolt.
If you’d like to change the number of sites or add storage of either Starter plan, you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan. You can do this from your Control Panel or reach out to our Support Team.
Today is a day of a big change in Servebolt, as we’re happy to announce the public beta release of Node and NPM support in the Servebolt Cloud. This change is one of the largest additions to our stack since we launched our Servebolt Cloud.
The goal of this release is to enable developers using the Servebolt Cloud as the infrastructure to run their build processes and similar. This means that in our release today, we do not include the possibility to run Node.js front-end applications and websites.
Beta terms
Support for Node.js and NPM is currently in public beta. This means that our SLA does not cover issues caused by Node.js and NPM, and you’re using it at your own risk.
We would, however, love to hear how you are using it, and get feedback on possible improvements for the future and public release.
Our Git feature that allows for near instant deployment of your updated code in your defined branch has seen an upgrade today. We’ve upgraded Git on all our Bolts to Git 2.22. If you’re making use of our deployment Git integration in the Servebolt Control Panel, you don’t need to change anything. Everything will work as expected.
If you’re running a Git clone yourself somewhere in the public folder, you’ll have some extra features available to you now. We’re highlighting a few:
Git branch got the very helpful–show-current to learn which branch you have currently checked out. This should facilitate orientation within repos, while git difftool can now run outside of repositories.
Users can create a branch from the merge base of two other branches, since thebranchand checkout -bcommands are now able to understand the triple-dot merge base syntax (e.g. git branch new A…B).
git stash is now a pure C implementation, which should improve performance amongst other things.
Today we’re introducing a minor change to our naming of the amount of requests included in a plan. Page views was an inaccurate naming of what we count, as we always have been counting more than just page views (like API requests and similar).
We have rolled out a cloud-wide update of the compression library zlib-ng. The newest version is a bit faster, resulting in faster compression on the server. zlib-ng is one of many optimizations we have in our stack to ensure that we’re the fastest hosting alternative.
We have some big news for you! We have implemented Cloudflare Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) in the Servebolt Optimizer plugin for WordPress. With Cloudflare APO, you get multiple performance enhancements on your site, with just one click. One of those enhancements is HTML caching at Cloudflare’s edge, which can greatly enhance the load time globally.
Today we released version 2.1.2 of the Servebolt Optimizer WordPress Plugin. Both version 2.1.2 and version 2.1.1 are minor bug fixes, mostly related to the plugins backend JavaScript.
We have implemented a feature which automatically add timestamp query strings to assets (stylesheets and scripts) in Servebolt Optimizer for WordPress. This feature is available in the settings of the plugin, and is configurable using WP CLI.
We now to a better job at purging archives and other related URLs. We have also added new filters to control the amount of archive pages to purge when then archive is paginated.
Passwords to SSH/SFTP and database are automatically created when creating a Bolt, and a new site on an existing Bolt. These are now shown in the control panel after you create a new Bolt or site, and will only be displayed once. We do not store the passwords in the control panel for security purposes, and therefore the passwords can only be displayed once after they are set.
Be sure to copy the passwords after creating a Bolt or a site, and store your passwords somewhere safe.
