When we set up our website on the google cloud platform and check-up the performance test on GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insight, we got some “F” grade results, like showing below images.
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Figure GTMetrix Results
Figure Google Page Speed Insight results
We get the cause of this result of Expires Headers on our website. That also can affect our ranking on google.
So now, we are going tweaking our WordPress VM instances in Google Cloud step by step.
Connect Compute Engine with SSH
First, we will connect our VM instances or Compute engine through SSH, and then we will use some command for adding expires headers. We will note all commands and certainly down with steps.
Now, (After connecting VM with SSH), we are going to execute a command for editing httpd.conf, the command looks like:
sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
Enable Expires Headers
In this step, we will search the expire headers modules, so we will click CTRL+W, then search by writing “expires” and hit ENTER. Now a list will open like the picture shown below.
You can see the red box, we going to remove the Hound (#) sign like this:
{#LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so} to {LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so}Adding Expires Headers
After enabling the expires headers modules we will add more information about the expires headers by a command
sudo nano /opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf/httpd-app.confAfter using this command, there will open a page shown in the picture below. We will add some expires headers text.
We should add the text between the tag:
</IfModule> and <IFDefine USE_PHP_FPM>
The text looks like this the picture shown above, or you can copy the text from below.
<filesMatch ".(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
</filesMatch>
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>
Now restart apache server by command.
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apacheTest Performance
Now everything is done, so we will test the performance of the site. We will use GTmetrix.
The performance is not so great, but it is better than first. Before adding the expires headers module, we get 0 out of 100 and now about 45 out of 100.
Thank You!
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