AKantio Cache

Description

• Page cache served before WordPress loads, with optional server rules (Apache/LiteSpeed and an nginx snippet) that serve pages without PHP.
• Smart purge and background preload when content, comments, terms, WooCommerce stock/prices, ACF fields, page-builder templates or translations change.
• Never caches logged-in users, carts, checkouts, account pages, previews or responses that set cookies.
• Redis object cache drop-in with TLS, ACL users, igbinary, LZF/Zstandard compression, metrics and a circuit breaker that keeps the site fast when Redis is down.
• Optimizations: CSS/JS minify, defer or delay JavaScript, lazy loading, image dimensions, font-display swap, self-hosted Google Fonts and CDN assets, YouTube click-to-load, link prefetching, CDN URL rewrite and bloat removal.
• Database cleanup on a schedule or on demand.
• Cloudflare integration for your own zone and purge integrations for common hosting caches.
• Optional: connect to AKantio for managed Redis and a managed CDN, configured automatically.

Every feature in the plugin works without an account and without paying: use your own Redis server and your own CDN. Managed Redis and the managed CDN are optional paid services run by AKantio outside the plugin.

All settings are made in WP Admin → AKantio Cache. To run the page cache, WordPress needs the WP_CACHE constant, so the plugin adds one marked line to wp-config.php and removes it when the page cache is turned off or the plugin is deactivated. If wp-config.php already sets WP_CACHE, the plugin leaves it as it is. Hosts can stop the plugin writing to wp-config.php with the akantio_cache_wpconfig_readonly filter; the line can then be added by hand.

Source code

The admin screens are a React app. The compiled files in build/ are made from the human-readable sources in admin-src/, which are included in the plugin together with package.json. To rebuild them: npm install then npm run build. The PHP code is not compiled; its single library (matthiasmullie/minify) is installed by Composer from composer.json.

External services

The plugin works on its own. It contacts the services below only for the features you turn on.

AKantio (managed services)

Used only after you connect the site to AKantio (Managed services → Connect), to configure managed Redis and the managed CDN; and, without connecting, when you open the Managed services screen, to show the available plans.

• Opening the Managed services screen: the plan list is downloaded from akache.akantio.com. No site data is sent.
• Connecting: the site address, WordPress address and the versions of the plugin, WordPress, PHP, WooCommerce and the PHP Redis extension.
• While connected: the managed Redis and CDN settings are downloaded; after each sync and once a day, a health report is sent (versions, whether Redis, the page cache and the CDN are in use, and setup problem codes); CDN purge requests list the URLs that changed; once a week, the time to connect to each Redis region is measured from your server and sent, so AKantio can recommend the closest region.
• Disconnecting deletes the site’s keys at AKantio.

Managed Redis databases are hosted by Redis Cloud (Redis Ltd.) and the managed CDN runs on Cloudflare, on AKantio’s accounts. Cached data stays in your Redis database; static files are served through the CDN.

AKantio terms: https://akantio.com/terms/ — privacy policy: https://akantio.com/privacy/

Cloud provider endpoints (region latency)

While connected to AKantio, the plugin opens a TCP connection (and closes it right away) to a public endpoint of each Redis region’s cloud provider, for example ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com, to time it. No data is sent. Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ and https://aws.amazon.com/privacy/ ; Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/terms and https://policies.google.com/privacy ; Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/ and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacy/privacystatement

Cloudflare (your own zone)

Used only when you enter your own Cloudflare API token and zone ID. The plugin calls api.cloudflare.com to purge changed URLs and, if you turn it on, to manage the HTML cache rule of your zone. Sent: your API token (as authorization), the zone ID and the URLs to purge. Terms: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ — privacy policy: https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/

Google Fonts, public CDNs and Gravatar (self-hosting)

These features do the opposite of offloading: they remove a remote dependency that a page of your site already has. Off by default. The plugin does not add any of these files, and no AKantio account is involved. Each file is downloaded once from the address your page already uses, then served from wp-content/cache/akantio on your own site, and the page no longer calls the remote server. If a download fails, the page keeps its original address.

Used only when you turn on “Self-host Google Fonts”, “Self-host third-party scripts and styles” or “Self-host Gravatars”. The plugin downloads the files your pages already load from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com; cdn.jsdelivr.net, cdnjs.cloudflare.com, unpkg.com, code.jquery.com, ajax.googleapis.com, use.fontawesome.com, maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com and stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com; or gravatar.com, and serves them from your site, so your visitors no longer contact these services. Only the file address is requested. Google: https://policies.google.com/terms and https://policies.google.com/privacy ; jsDelivr: https://www.jsdelivr.com/terms ; cdnjs (Cloudflare): https://www.cloudflare.com/website-terms/ ; unpkg: https://unpkg.com ; jQuery CDN (OpenJS Foundation): https://openjsf.org/terms and https://openjsf.org/privacy ; Font Awesome: https://fontawesome.com/support ; BootstrapCDN (jsDelivr): https://www.jsdelivr.com/terms ; Gravatar (Automattic): https://wordpress.com/tos/ and https://automattic.com/privacy/

YouTube (click-to-load)

When “YouTube click-to-load” is on, embedded YouTube videos are replaced by their preview image from i.ytimg.com; the player from youtube-nocookie.com loads only when a visitor clicks play. These videos were already embedded by your content; the plugin only delays them. Terms: https://www.youtube.com/t/terms — privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy