Using Advanced Tools in the User Portal

NOTE

These tools are only made available to a small subset of customers on a case-by-case basis. If you are simply looking for WP CLI or direct file access, check out SSH Gateway instead.


Read-Only Filesystem

When this tool is enabled, changes cannot be made to your site’s code using the WordPress Admin Dashboard. The only way to make changes would be using  Git or SFTP. This tool also disables the ability to install or update your plugins, themes, and WordPress core files. The read-only filesystem option is only available to users with Advanced Tools access.


Cache Exclude Paths

Available only with Advanced Tools access, this feature allows users to exclude a specific page or URI path from our Page Cache. It’s important to be very specific when choosing which pages should be excluded from cache, since caching helps ensure your site can be served quickly and scale when more traffic is sent to it.

We highly recommend excluding only the specific page(s) running into caching conflicts. Some examples of pages which might be good to exclude from cache:

  • Any custom login page URL
  • A cart or checkout page which is not named “cart,” “checkout,” or “check-out” (these are already excluded from cache)
  • A page which requires dynamic results to show for different users who are not logged into the site.

The tool accepts regular expressions (regex), meaning entering just “/foo” would match /bar/foo as well as /bar/foo/baz, whereas entering “^/foo” would only match URI paths which start with /foo (matches /foo/bar but not /bar/foo).


Cache Exclude Query Arguments

Similar to “Cache-exclude: Paths,” this tool is only available to those with Advanced Tools access and allows users to exclude requests from our Page Cache based on the query argument or variable added to the end of the URL.

If I had the URL mydomain.com/?page=home and I needed anything using the “page” variable to not be cached, I would enter “page” in this section. This section also accepts regular expressions.

Since these variables could be tagged onto any URL, it’s important to only exclude variables which will be used sparingly, and only those which absolutely require the page to be excluded from cache.


Perm-Reload-Apply

This command is available only with Advanced Tools access, and regenerates all configuration files for the site, including the wp-config.php file. It resets file permissions, regenerates our server configuration files, and gracefully reloads our server software.

Please use this command sparingly, since it can use up a lot of server resources to perform this command. This button should only be used when configuration changes have been made, but the changes aren’t being reflected or taking effect.


NEXT STEP: Connect to your WordPress site using SSH

Code-level performance analytics

Application Performance provides real-time, code-level visibility to help you troubleshoot faster, optimize WordPress experiences, and increase development agility.