Enhanced caching for static WordPress sites on Shifter and custom domain updates

For this weeks release, we have addressed something any website performance fanatic would enjoy.

We’ve added Expires headers to the static generated version of your WordPress site on Shifter. Surprisingly enough they were not there before and caused a few red flags to be thrown for anyone testing their newly created static site against an old hosting server.

While Shifter is backed by CloudFront and served over CDN it could use additional header data to help your browser understand what to hang onto and for how long.

For example, CloudFront can and does cache inherently. Getting a hit or miss from CloudFront isn’t necessarily going to let your browser know how long that asset is good for.

By adding Expires headers any static WordPress site on Shifter will get a better score out of the gate no config necessary. All you need to do is generate your site and deploy.

That’s not all though! We’ve also released an update for how we handle SAN domains, also known as Subject Alternative Names. This related to a feature we released last week in our efforts to make domains easier to manage on Shifter.

We use SAN Certificates for issuing multiple domains names to a single static site. That includes the on.getshifter.io name, your custom domain, the www version of that domain and more.

To take advantage of this added coverage you’ll need to detach and reattach the custom domain you’re using for that project. After that, it’ll begin to take effect and give you better flexibility with custom domain support.

There was also a few bugs squashed in the WordPress Feed URLS. Thank you to all the customers for your feedback and helping us resolve this!