How to improve your website performance
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Once you understand your Web Accelerator Cache reports, you can use the data to optimise your website.
Use the following guide to interpret your results and take action.
Interpreting your data
| High HITS & HIT GRACE | This is good! Your server load is low, and your website is loading fast for visitors. |
| High MISS | Normal after clearing cache or launching new pages. If it stays high, you may have pages that are not commonly visited. |
| High PASS | Expected for e-commerce sites or websites where users log in frequently, as that specific data cannot be cached by this cache service.
Note: If your site does not generate unique content per user, this is something that should be investigated by a developer. |
| High HIT-FOR-MISS | Your website is actively preventing cache on many resources; either they are too large, or cache-control headers are instructing the Cache not to store the resource. |
How to improve your Cache Hits
If your Pass or Hit-for-Miss rates are higher than expected, check your website headers for the following specific diagnostic markers:
1. Address “PASS” Responses
Check the header: X-Lacquer-Pass-Reason
- Reason: If it mentions “Cookie” or “Session”, your website is sending user-specific data on public pages.
- Action: Strip these headers in your PHP code or CMS plugins for public-facing pages.
2. Address “HIT-FOR-MISS” Responses
Check the header: X-Lacquer-Hit-For-Miss-Reason
- Reason: If it mentions Cache-Control header, your site is sending headers like no-store, no-cache, or private.
- Action: Check SEO, security, or optimisation plugins that might be overriding your cache settings.
- Reason: “Response too large”: The file exceeds the 5 MB limit.
- Action: Compress images or optimise large resources to bring them under the 5 MB threshold.
How to test your progress
Open your terminal or browser DevTools and look for these specific indicators:
- First Hit: Look for X-Cache: MISS or PASS.
- Second Hit: Look for X-Cache: HIT.
- The Secret Indicator: If the Age header is 0 every time you refresh, your cache is being bypassed.
- Uncachable response from the webserver: Look for the “X-Lacquer-Hit-For-Miss-Reason” header to see why a resource was not cached.
Read more about Web Accelerator Cache reports.
