SiteGround Optimizer 5.6 - Heartbeat control, Automatic Database Optimization and More for Even Faster Websites!
Table of Contents
We have just launched the latest major update of the SiteGround Optimizer plugin. The new version greatly enhances what’s already the best performance solution for your website if you are hosted with SiteGround! If you follow the plugin’s changelog you will notice that for the last few years we’ve constantly improved and added more and more functionalities turning the plugin from a simple connector to our server caching systems to an overall performance solution for your WordPress site. Now I am excited to guide you through the most recent features that will help you make your site run even faster:
WordPress Heartbeat Control
The Heartbeat API allows your browser to communicate with the WordPress application when you’re logged into your admin panel. This functionality makes it possible to handle things like scheduled tasks, post and page revisions, locking of a post when someone else is editing it, and more.
Although it’s a great piece of functionality it may cause excessive CPU usage when left unsupervised. For example, if you just leave a couple of tabs open in your browser on the post edit page, that will execute a script saving your content as a draft for each tab every 15 seconds. That alone results in 480 executions per hour and 11520 per day.
Most people don’t need to save that often. For example, if you’re writing a blog post, having a save every 3 minutes is perfectly fine. With the new settings in the SiteGround Optimizer, you can either completely disable the Heartbeat API if you don’t have any functionality requiring it, or you can set it to work at far bigger intervals. By default, we disable it on your admin and frontend pages and leave it only on post edit to run every 180 seconds.
Automatic Database Maintenance
This optimization is really important for WordPress websites but often neglected by webmasters. That’s why we’ve added it to the plugin and set it to run every week. Having that feature enabled will automatically clean your spam comments and trashed posts and pages, and will perform a table optimization and clear all the expired transients from your database. Basically, you will be sure that your database is in a top condition without having to perform the same tasks manually on a regular basis.
DNS Pre-fetch
With this option, you can easily add all external domains that your site uses to serve external resources so your site can tell browsers to pre-fetch them and save time from resolving these domains each time they are used by a resource.
By default, browsers are pretty smart when it comes to domain resolution and pre-fetching all commonly used external domains. They manage to avoid resolving the same domain multiple times. But, their automatic pre-fetch doesn’t work at all times. For example, if you have external resources in your CSS and JS they won’t be automatically pre-fetched by the browser. That is why we added an option in the SiteGround Optimizer where you can list all external domains and thus make sure that the browsers will have those domains’ IP addresses ready for use. That feature helps reduce page loading times.
Improved Memcached Integration
Memcached is a great optimization feature, but due to compulsory Memcached limits it works only for objects smaller than 1MB. That’s more than enough in 99% of the cases, but as more and more plugins and themes are dropping huge chunks of data into the options table, we have started to notice more attempts for using Memcached for bigger objects. That is why we have come up with a smart way to use Memcached in such cases too. We have added a self-learning mechanism that excludes the options with the biggest values from the object that needs to be cached, so it stays under 1MB. This way we manage to provide Memcached at least for a part of the initial big object.
Deprecation of the PHP Switcher
In this version, we’ve decided to completely remove the functionality to switch the PHP version of a website. We took that decision for two main reasons – we wanted to avoid duplication of the functionality as that version control already exists in cPanel and Site Tools, where it logically belongs; and to alleviate the plugin so it takes less disk space and inodes.
Comments ( 68 )
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David Wickstead
Do you have a version for Joomla?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I am afraid not.
Alain
Sad that you don't support Joomla anymore.
Colinz
Another great upgrade to an already impressive plugin. Thanks SG
Sam
Hi HRISTO Can you please send me a link of an article to set the plugin completely with more details about the functionalities. If you have a video, it would be fantastic.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We are working on something like that and I hope it will be ready soon. Meanwhile, you can check the information under each optimization in the plugin interface and see how each one affects your site.
Abel
I appreciate the hard work please make a detail video tutorial in that case I'll decide to only use to SG Optimizer Thanks again
Chris
Any plans for service worker generation? Mainly for local caching?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Service workers work great but it is someting that would be really difficult to implement on a massive scale without causing a lot of prolems with themes and plugin not following standards. At this point it is not in our roadmap but I will consider it for future new functionality.
Kim Jackson
This Siteground Optimizer has been really good for my website.
Jetxpert
Please clarify: You stated above that the database is automatically cleaned or maintained "every week." Your statement does not agree with what the plugin actual states ("every 48 hours"). Click here: http://prntscr.com/tq26z6 Which one is correct?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It is performed weekly, sorry for that, we will fix the text in the plugin asap.
Evolv
Can you use this plugin on other WordPress sites that are not hosted with Siteground or is it specifically for Siteground sites only?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
You can use it only ot SiteGround servers since it relies on our speciffic server configuration to operate properly.
Tyrrell
Are there any plans to speed up or optimize the Joomla platform by SiteGround?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
At this point we don't have plans to port the SG Optimizer functionality to support Joomla.
Josh
Great update! With all these features, can it replace WP Rocket?
DJG
The upgrade seems to have crashed my site. I use Avada and it now shows a blank page.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
The plugin works great with Avada, please post a thread in the plugin forum and provide your site URL and we will see what went wrong.
Norwest
Same thing happened to me - will check the plugin forum
Samuel
Love it, Keep up the good Work
Fabio
Great plugin. I noticed a small bug though. The lazy loading of pictures causes a layout shift. I had to disable that option and use a specific plugin instead.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
That must be some incompatibility with your theme. Please, post a ticket in the plugin thread at WordPress dot org and we will look into it.
Alan
That is great information and I will start to use the plugin.
Stephen Vaughan
Hi Hristo, On the Let's Cycle Ireland site I built recently we have map embeds from Ride with GPS embedded on the itineraries. I notice how these extra load to the pages. Will DNS Pre-fetch for External Domains help with this?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I would say add those external domains and see how that affects those loading times. Generally, it should help :)
jules
Can we use the "Reduce DNS lookups" section in GTMetrix to find out which domains should be prefetched? Would need to run it for a few different pages that have different things on them to cover them all, or is there a better way to find the domains?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
That depends on your particular website. You can use the info from GTMetrix too as it is a convenient way to get them all.
SL
I installed the heartbeat plugin on the advice of your support team some time ago. Does this mean I can now delete it with this new update to the optimiser plugin?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Yes :)
Paul
On the DNS Pre-Fetch is it automatically used for external sites or must we specify? Do you have any documentation on this as in your image you have it saying //platform.twitter.com and in the instructions you say exclude http://
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
No, you need to include domains that you want to be pre-fetched. It is a smart field and we clear the protocol converting it properly to //.
JoAnn's Food Bites
Thank you for the email. I installed the SG Optimizer today!
Clif Graves
What optimizer and ClassicPress? Is the current version backward compatible to Wordpress 4.x
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We do not support ClassicPress. As for the backwards compatibility the plugin should work just fine but we do not test with such old versions of WordPress and some issues may occur.
Tod
Any conflicts with WP-Rocket plugin?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I don't recommend using WP Rocket together with our plugin. SG Optimizer proides full performance solution and you simply don't need it. Having two plugins working on your site speed can cause only conflicts and issues.
Ed
When will Joomla be supported?
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
We don't have plans to port the SG Optimizer functionality to Joomla at this point.
Yaron
the plug-in does have issues with recaptcha v3 , it has to be deferred from render blocking. I would check if that's something that needs to be built in,, or maybe something else could be done oo…. and another thing I just remembered. it causes the front and editor of WPBakery Page Builder to not work. There should be some way to disable optimization for all the backend/logged in administrators I noticed many other things but those are two that comes to mind
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It is normal that some scripts must be excluded from certain optimizations. That's why we've made an intuitive interface to do so without having to deal with filters and code. As to your other question, we've added a patch for WPBakery and similar plugins that tend to "lie" WordPress that backend requests are actually front end ones months ago. So if you keep experiencing such problems, please post a thread in the plugin forum and we will look into it.
Jasper
I'm currently using the WProcket plugin, which is setup by a professional, to handle the optimalization. Is there any pro's or cons to switch to you guys optimizer? If I would look at this from your guys perspective your optimizer should be outperform all since it's dedicated for your platform. Looking forward and feel free to set up a call to compare them side by side.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Our caching is faster and the plugin is free. Generally, SG Optimizer is the best plugin you can use on our infrastructure.
James
Hi, Where will I find more information about the 'Combine JavaScript Files' option please? It sounds like it could be a major benefit but I get a warning ('a script is generating uniquely named files which results in our combined assets taking up huge amount of disk space') so I can't use it. I have no idea how to track down the script and therefore get the necessary info to exclude it. Any help or advice would be much appreciated.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Please, open a thread in the plugin forum and we will look into it: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/sg-cachepress/
Surendra Jadli
Hi, I was using autoptimize plugin. It created a white screen problem for my blog page. The problem was identified by siteground team and now my site is working fine. I recommend using SG Optimizer plugin. Now I am not having any issues. Thanks siteground team.
Gabriel
Hello, The last update of the plugin disables "Disable native WordPress lazyloading". In the tests I did, I prefer the WP 5.5 native system (which gives better performance on my website). How can I make "lazyloading" native WP work? Thanks for the answer.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
It should work out of the box. How did you make those tests? We both use the same core library, SGO just covers more elements and does have patches for problematic plugins + more control. The core lazy loading shouldn't be providing better results unless you were testing with both on on the other experiment :)
Winston
What about compatibility update for webp with cloudflare CDN?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hi, WebP is served from cache to all browsers aside from Safari, which should be fixed with the version 14 release. But meanwhile if you want to use WebP properly, please disable static caching in your CDN settings.
PCKeys
Pre-Load /Prime cache: As I understand it, building the cache relies on first visitor per page, where it is then stored and served from cache for subsequent visitors. Do you have plans to add a feature to pre-load/prime the cache for some/all pages (after a purge or WP update for example) instead of relying on first visitors to trigger caching of that page? Cheers
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
We don't have such plans currently, but we might consider it for a future release.
Ben G
The plugin details that it will "Perform Database Optimization for MyISAM tables". Will this also work for InnoDB tables?
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Unlike MyISAM, InnoDB can keep itself optimized, so this option wasn't added to our plugin.
Ben G
That's cool, I didn't know that - thanks for this information.
Paul
SG Optimizer probleem met Pronamic in combinatie Gravity Forms. Een betaal optie in een Gravity form met Pronamic veroorzaakt een probleem. Verzend formulier gaat perfect, echter er verschijnt geen betaaloptie van de bank. Door de SG Optimizer uit te schakelen is het probleem opgelost. Vermoedelijk zit dat in de Combine Javascript Files
Marina Yordanova Siteground Team
Hello, please describe the issue you experience in the Support section for SG Optimizer here https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/sg-cachepress/ The team that maintains the plugin will be able to review it and help further.
alastair
Hello - I like the option of the WordPress Heartbeat Optimization. This can create a lot of traffic as we have some clients who use multiple tabs for managing sites and it can suck up cycles mightily quickly. Will be testing going forward.
Alastair
Is there any documentation on the new CloudFlare settings. Our sites are all routed via Cloudflare. On a few we have integrated with the SG Optimiser option using our email and API. We also use the Rocket Cache and CDN for a few sites. Have had report that clients have seen Cloudflare Worker 1025 error messages. Slightly concerning and trying to understand what the cloudflare options actually implements. Thanks.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Yes, you can check the SG Optimizer Tutorial. We will add detailed information about the new functionality later today. Our implementation uses workers too.
Carla
Wow awesome! are there customizable settings? for examples, i would prefer to have the last 3 post revisions accessible but anything after that, auto deleted....
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
Yes, but that's something you define in the wp-config.php file:
define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 10 );Nick Garnett
Just found something interesting: Mobile menu, logo and search not working on mysite and I fixed it bt unchecking 'combine javascript files' in SG Optimser.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
That's not really a fix, you should enable it and then use the exclud functionality to exclude that particular script that's not working well with this optimization.
Edward
I've already expressed elsewhere how pleased I am with how Site Tools turned out, and I'm also pleased with the Optimizer improvements. These are among the reasons I continue to refer clients to SG. Not critical, but a suggestion for future updates of Optimizer, if possible: It would be great if I could set the *Scheduled Database Maintenance* tool to "Delete all page and post revisions" EXCEPT the last x revisions. I'm all for stopping the revisions from piling up, but having the last few on hand at any given time has saved me more than once from a user error that wasn't discovered for days, or longer.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
I will add that to the roadmap, indeed it makes sense to have a config on how much revisions to keep.
Shaun
If I switch on the Scheduled Database Maintenance to clean the database regularly, will this override my bit of code I've placed in the functions.php of my theme to prevent the posts trash being emptied? I don't want my post trash emptied as it is used as a reference so that users can see all post history.
Hristo Pandjarov Siteground Team
In that case, keep your current code and that optimization off. It's part of the maintenance and we can't disable it as of now.
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