Hey there, welcome back to Cloudways, your go-to platform for hassle-free web hosting solutions. We’re all about making web hosting easier so you can grow your business faster. I’m Shahzeb Ahmed, Community Manager at Cloudways What is Cloudways Breeze Cache Plugin and today we’re exploring a game-changing tool designed to increase your WordPress site speed The Cloudways Breeze Plugin! Let’s dive into the world of speed and optimization! Breeze is a WordPress caching plugin developed by Cloudways that optimizes your WordPress website and reduces the load time of web pages. Breeze has more than 300,000 active installations. The plugin is free, powerful and easy to use, helping you improve user experience and SEO rankings. In this video, I’ll show you how to configure Breeze and some of its great features. Let’s begin with how to install Breeze. To do this, you will need WordPress application version 4.5 or higher and a PHP version 7.4 or higher. If you use the Cloudways platform, you might already have the Breeze plugin installed. On Cloudways there are three different versions of WordPress to choose from: WordPress 6.22 with Cloudways optimization, Wordpress Multisite and Clean WordPress with no optimization. WordPress 6.22 with Cloudways optimization is an excellent choice for most individual users and small businesses. This version already includes the Breeze Plugin so you don’t need to install it. If you use another version or are not a Cloudways user I’ll explain the installation process. Install and Configure Cloudways Breeze First, log in to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to the ‘Plugins’ tab and click on ‘Add New’. Next search for the Breeze plugin and click Install now, then click ‘Activate.’ The plugin is now installed and activated. Now that Breeze is activated, I’ll show you how to configure the plugin. Go to ‘Settings’ and select ‘Breeze’. Understanding Basic Options We will start with the ‘Basic Options’ tab. Here, you can enable or disable caching, minification, and browser cache according to your site’s needs. Cache System: Enable the basic cache for your WordPress site at all times. It makes your website faster by storing static versions of your pages. Purge Cache After: This option purges internal cache automatically after a set number of minutes. By default we have kept it for 1 day or 1440 mins. Gzip compression: Keep this turned on to compress your files so your web pages load faster with fewer requests. Browser Cache: Enable this option to tell the browser when to get new static files. It helps browsers decide whether to ask the server for the file or use the only one they already have in their cache. Lazy Load Images: With this option the images will load before being displayed on screen. Next is File optimization. Configure File Optimization File optimization refers to minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce page size and load time by removing white spaces and comments. the content appears in compact form. The Breeze plugin also allows minifying inline CSS and JavaScript. Setup Preload fonts Preload Webfont: Here you can choose a web address for the font or a CSS file that loads only fonts. It’s best to use WOFF fonts for speed. Don’t load the entire website’s CSS file because it can make your site slower. Avoid adding Google Fonts links because they already load quickly. Preload Links: When a user hovers over links for more than 150 milliseconds the cache gets ready. This makes the page load faster when they click on the link. Prefetch of DNS Request: This is primarily used to make websites load faster and increase overall performance. You should add only one domain per line for DNS prefetching. Never Cache URLs: Advanced Optimization Options Here you can specify URLs of pages or posts to exclude from the plugin’s internal cache. If you exclude URLs under the Never Cache option this will also exclude these URLs from Varnish and Cloudflare. This means there is no need to exclude pages or posts at the server level. Cache Query Strings: Pages that contain the query strings are added here will be cached. Make sure each one is on a separate line. Disable Emoji: This will disable emoji libraries and CSS loading by default in WordPress to reduce HTTP requests. Let’s move on to the Heartbeat API. Imagine you are writing a message to a friend. Every few seconds your phone checks to see if you have received a new message. That’s similar to what the Heartbeat API does in WordPress. It’s like a messenger that runs in the background, checking and sending information between your websites and the server while you are logged in. The Breeze plugin by Cloudways Heartbeat API helps you control how often the Heartbeat API checks for new information. It’s like adjusting how often your phone checks for new messages. You can adjust the frequency for different parts of your website: the front-end (what visitors see), the post editor (where you write posts) and the back-end (the admin dashboard). After you make these adjustments in the Breeze plugin you save the changes and your website should run more smoothly! So in short the Heartbeat API is like a helpful messenger in WordPress but sometimes it can be too active and slow down your website. The Breeze plugin lets you control this messenger so that your websites runs more efficiently. Database Optimization Your WordPress application gathers a lot of information as time passes. Unfortunately, some information is unnecessary taking up space in your database, such as post revisions, auto-drafted content, trashed content, comments from trash and spam. Therefore, it is essential to remove unwanted data to keep the database lightweight and clean. Cloudways offers the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on and you don’t need to make any special configurations within Breeze for it to work. For more information about Cloudflare check the link in this video’s description. Cache Optimization via Varnish The Breeze plugin is also configured for Varnish Cache to make your website more robust. All of the settings are pre-configured so you don’t need to make any adjustments. Auto Purge Varnish: We recommend that you keep this option enabled at all times to automatically purge Varnish cache on actions like publishing new blog posts, pages, and comments and when switching themes. Varnish Server: This is the default pre-installed Varnish server IP address of Cloudways servers. Purge Varnish Cache: You can also manually purge the entire cache instantly by pressing this button. Once you are done, click Save Changes. You can import and export your Breeze configurations using the WordPress Admin Panel or WordPress Command Line Interface (CLI). Tools for import/export settings If you want to export your Breeze settings, click Download Settings. The configurations will be downloaded in a .json file on your local computer. You can also export Breeze settings by using WP CLI. Import Configurations Similarly, if you already have Breeze settings in the .json file, you can import them by clicking Choose File and navigating to the file available on your local computer. Next, click Upload File and Import Settings. You can also import configurations by using WP CLI. With the Cloudways Breeze Plugin your website will be faster and your user experience and SEO rankings will get a big boost. If you have any questions feel free to comment down below and subscribe to our channel to get more helpful Cloudways tutorials. Thanks for watching! See you in the next video!