Full Page Cache | v1.8.0

When you don’t have FPC extension installed, each time a visitor comes to any page of your website, Magento first reads a bunch of configuration files to check which blocks need to be displayed on the page. After that Magento takes each block and starts “generating” it and placing on the page. This all takes much time.

With the Full Page Cache extension, when a visitor comes to any page of your website, the extension already has a ready page to serve. The page had been prepared and saved into cache with the very first visit, so Magento did all the rendering work only once as opposed to each time someone opens the page.

Thus, it saves up to 1-3 seconds on each page request. Respect your customers’ time and they will literally pay you back.

Immediate Page Load

According to our research and tests, regular product view page in Magento takes around 2.2 seconds to load. Using our FPC extension, it takes 45 ms (0.045s) to load the page, which is more than 40 times faster.

Therefore having the same server hardware and configuration, your website can serve much more pages from cache, saving more money.

Setup cache update schedule

You can specify the time period for updating your cache. It will be updated as often as you choose. This will help to keep your data up to date with minimum speed loss. The feature is useful when your website gets updated not only via admin panel (e.g. when products are imported by some automatic script). Changes done via Magento admin panel get cached immediately.

You’re in control of whether to use dynamic blocks or not. The Full Page Cache extension completely supports caching of dynamic blocks, serving both page and blocks from cache.

Dynamic blocks, such as shopping cart sidebar block, shopping cart floating window, logged in customer welcome message, and others are cached separately for each visitor of your website. And when some page is served from cache, dynamic blocks are being injected automatically into the “holes”. This is also known as holes punch feature.

Moreover, dynamic blocks of 3-rd party extensions are also supported. Specific behavior for such blocks may be configured on advanced level within the extension configuration file.

You might want to disable support of dynamic blocks completely if your custom theme does not use them, or if caching of third-party blocks works incorrectly.

SEO Improvement

It's hardly possible to overestimate the role of Magento speed optimization, as speed is one of the major factors for Google to rank a website. The page load time is measured by Google and other search engines and used to put your website higher in search results when your loading speed is faster.

Ability to exclude pages from caching

If you would like not to cache some pages, you can do so by listing the pages in the extension configuration section. For example, shopping cart page should not be cached, as it’s different each time and for each customer.

Automatic Cache Refresh

The FPC extension automatically keeps cache up-to-date. It refreshes different types of page cache when the information gets modified. For example, when you edit product information, the extension automatically refreshes cache for category, search and product view pages.This is handy, because at some point you or a staff member may forget to flush the cache manually. By the way, manual cache refresh is still available.

Advanced cache refresh options

• Reset page lifetime after each customer visit. When a particular page is visited by a customer and its cache is 'warmed', the page lifetime will be automatically reset. With this option you can easily optimize the cache process and keep all site pages timely cached.
• Automatically flush product pages cache after each purchase: choose whether to flush only product pages cache or the cache of associated pages as well.
• The extension offers an automatic cache clearing for the pages that depends on catalog price rules and pages with special prices set for particular dates.

Optimized storage usage

The module enables you not to separate cache for different customer groups, thus improving storage usage.

Cleanup old session files and report files

If left unchecked, Magento session files can grow out of control and have a negative impact on your store performance. Now you can automatically delete outdated session and report files using FPC extension. Additionally, you can determine how often (in days) you need to remove old session files.

Cache storage compression

This option enables you to quickly compress your data for cache storage. You can also specify the level of compression.

Possibility to limit cache size

Specify maximal database cache storage size in Megabytes to limit cache generation according to your needs.

Mobile themes support

With this option you'll be able to cache your mobile and web browser pages separately.

Multi currency sites support

The Full Page Cache extension also supports multi currency websites.

Support for SSL

The extension works with any kind of SSL secure sites. All secure pages get cached.

Compatibility for CDN

Whether you use Content Distribution Networks or not, the Full Page Cache extension will cache your entire page either way. Together with CDN you can get even better load speed results.

The mod supports native Magento mechanisms

We used only native Magento functionality to create the extension. It supports any Magento backend caches, so you have a choice what to use. As for:

• Memcache
• APC
• REDIS
• File Cache
• Database

The speed up Magento extension also supports Magento mobile theme, multiple stores & currency, doesn't depend on a webserver.

Moreover, our Full Page Cache extension is compatible with 3-rd party extensions and themes, it can cache any page, not depending if it's a standard Magento page (like category or product page) or a page created by some extension.

Cache AJAX requests

With the full page cache tool you can dramatically improve the speed of the Improved Layered Navigation and AJAX Scroll extensions by Amasty.

Why do you need a cache crawler?

Full Page Cache Crawler is an indispensable tool when it comes to 'warming the cache' for better page load performance. The pages visited by a great number of users require much more time and server resources during the first request for cache generation, while the following requests are performed faster, because the site displays cached content. Therefore, to make this process less time consuming and invisible for store visitors, the crawler is developed to crawl and request popular pages when the number of visitors is minimal.

How does the crawler work?

Full Page Cache crawler carefully sorts site pages choosing those that should be cached first of all and adds them to the queue. After the queue is generated, the crawler processes it using cron. The pages are generated emulating various combinations of parameters and then are cached.

Set parameters for page combinations

Each link from the queue is to be checked with all settings combinations from General Settings tab and with default settings, it means when there is no directions for the link. One can easily specify the following parameters for page combinations:

• Customer groups;
• Store views;
• Currency;
• Process mobile view ('yes'/'no');

Queue options

Queue options tab includes a rich list of settings that will help you to fine tune crawling process according to your needs.

Specify:

• The number of page URLs that should be processed at a single cron run;
• The maximal number of page URLs (rows) displayed on the queue grid;
• The source from which the links for crawling will be extracted;
• Pages that should be excluded from the crawling process;

Advanced options

• Set the maximal number of logs displayed on the log grid;
• Force cron job actions at any time you need;
• Enable the display of warning notifications in case of cron task performance issues;

Visual statistics

Due to fancy visual statistics you will easily keep track of crawling progress. Different types of data are carefully arranged in separate tabs:

• Codes of crawled pages statuses;
• Crawled pages;
• Page load time;
• Detailed queue processing information;

Customize crawler work

For a proper crawler work now you can:

• Regenerate cache lifetime - it means that if a particular page has been already cached, the cache lifetime will be automatically reset;
• Re-crawl page - this setting will not only reset page lifetime, but newly cache the page;

Customers frequently ask us how much faster Amasty Full Page Cache is, compared to Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache. So, to get the precise data we decided to conduct a series of tests. We ran rounds of tests for 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 simultaneous users.

The results showed that Amasty Full Page Cache surpassed Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache in most of the actions.To demonstrate how this works for your business, here’s the table of performance improvement you can get if you replace Magento Enterprise Full Page Cache with Amasty Magento FPC.

Apart from that, with the FPC Amasty tool you can:

• Cache AJAX requests of the Improved Layered Navigation;
• Use advanced cache crawler to constantly keep your cache 'warm';
• See handy visual cache stats;

Our customers were curious to find out how our extension stacks up against other modules on the market. So we've decided to conduct a study comparing Amasty Full Page Cache and Varnish Cache.

The results were astonishing. With our Full page cache 14 tested pages load 2-4 times faster than using Varnish Cache together with a Magento integration extension Turpentine. You can see the most significant difference when a user first visits a website, which is clearly the most important moment in visitor's path to purchase.