Using W3TC / AWS Cloudfront

  • Resolved csbwebmaster

    (@csbwebmaster)


    5 years, 11 months ago

    Hi friends:

    I’m new to W3TC. Been using it for a couple weeks. Finally took the plunge and setup Cloudfront as a CDN.

    When I run GTMETRIX or PINGDOM, both report that there are multiple redirects happening on my images. It is also saying that I’m getting an ‘F’ (on Pingdom) ADD EXPIRES HEADER, yet it looks like I have Cloudfront to expire content.

    Can someone advise please? Why is it saying that I don’t have EXPIRES headers? What do I need to configure in W3TC to set this? Or is there something else in Cloudfront?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter csbwebmaster

    (@csbwebmaster)

    Ok, I have worse problem now none of my images are coming from the CDN.

    I feel so over my head on this one. Going to turn off w3tc

    Thread Starter csbwebmaster

    (@csbwebmaster)

    Just a quick note, I figured out partly that it was the W3TC minify feature that was causing my layouts to be pooched (including missing images).

    Turned that off and instead used a different minification plug in and at least my site is back to normal in terms of visibility and proper display now.

    Phew!

    Plugin Contributor Marko Vasiljevic

    (@vmarko)

    Hello,

    I’ve tested your website on GTmetrix. Great score by the way. If you take a closer look at Add Expires headers, it showing third-party resources that we do not have any control over.

    Thread Starter csbwebmaster

    (@csbwebmaster)

    Thank you. I’ve been working hard to get it optimized.

    We are a very tiny non-profit and usually get little web traffic. Recently, we had an event where 400 near simultaneous users attempted to access the site to sign up for registration (a WPFORM). I was surprised to see that the hosting provider (AWS lightsail) couldn’t handle it. So I’ve been doing everything possible to optimize, including implementing our first CDN.

    Thanks for the reply, BTW. I really don’t do a lot of WP for scale…mostly small sites. But I used to be a Director doing enterprise infrastructure, and designing for scalability was my thing back then.

    I’ve a few things to figure out yet with Cloudfront/W3TC: Does purge trigger a purge of Cloudfront or just the Apache servers (W3TC/WP) cache?

    Is there a way to add versioning to file names or assets with a plugin so that updated assets published are newly populated to Cloudfront? (We use BigCommerce. When files are uploaded into their media library, they all get an asset link with a version that helps ensure refreshed assets are used.

    How do I ensure old/unused assets are dropped out of cloudfront or doesn’t that matter?

    How can I ensure that Cloudfront helps RE: DDOS and other threats.

    I was going to look into Cloudflare, but chose not to for quite a few reasons that I won’t get into here. But besides my main requirement (scalability, asset caching), is protection. I’ve not yet figured that out with CLoudfront.

    These are some things I’m still working on. I’m also trying to do some load testing using jmeter (I don’t have access to LoadRunner) to test the newly CDN-optimized site for scale. I’m sure we won’t really get much in the way of traffic anytime soon. But I’m hoping the recent reconfiguration, use of W3TC/Cloudfront, gives me a bit more scale. I don’t know how AWS Lightsail can be boosted (if at all) given load/demand. I don’t know that it’s fixed or scalable as a service.

    Anyways, thanks for the reply. Got some more to do yet. But it’s improving.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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