There are many different configuration options available under the Settings tab for sites. It's important to explore these options to find different ways to improve pull site performance and customize content delivery. This article will define these options.
Custom Domain Settings
This is where you put domains that point to your CDN URL. For instance, if you shortened and rebranded your CDN URL by creating a CNAME record, you need to put that custom URL in this section.
Edge Settings
There are seven options in the Edge Settings section:
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Compression stands for gzip compression. When enabled, assets delivered by StackPath are compressed with gzip.
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Advanced Compression Level lets you choose your gzip level. By default, gzip compression is set to 1. With this option you can choose a compression level from 1 to 6, six being the highest level of compression.
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Content Disposition forces files to behave as if the end-user chose the “Save As” dialog. In other words, it forces the browser to automatically download files to the desktop. Enable this option with caution.
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Strip All Cookies tells StackPath CDN servers to ignore cookies from the origin. This may lead to a higher cache hit ratio but interrupt services that require cookies to work properly. Enable this option with caution.
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Pseudo Streaming lets you serve some media files (flv and mp4 with h.264 encoding). Be aware that the first request to an un-cached large media file will be slow.
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XFF is a standard HTTP header used for identifying the originating IP address of a client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy (StackPath).
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Add CORS Header is used to prevent browsers from denying content to load from the CDN and other sources. This option is commonly enabled to handle the web fonts issue.
Cache Settings
There are five options in the Cache Settings section:
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Set Default Cache Time determines how long files should be stored on caching systems before they're forced to request a new copy of the file from your origin. Examples of caching systems include servers on StackPath's CDN network and local caches used by web browsers like Chrome. This setting is ignored if your origin server sets a cache time on its own. By default, StackPath honors all cache settings set by the origin.
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Override Cache Control Header lets you set a custom cache time for web browsers that's different from the cache time for StackPath CDN servers. The article How to Leverage the Browser Cache with a CDN offers some best practices for setting cache times. With this enabled, the Set Default Cache Time option will set the cache time for StackPath and the Override Cache Control Header will set the cache time for the browser.
To enable this, the box next to the Ignore Cache Control option must be ticked.
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Use Stale lets StackPath CDN servers deliver expired content when 1) StackPath is busy fetching new content from the origin or 2) when our servers can't access your origin due to an unexpected status code. In an extreme case, our servers would be able to continue delivering content for your website if your origin went down.
You can determine what status codes constitute as stale by entering a status code (403, 404, 504, etc.) in the field below Serve expired content. After typing a status code, press the Enter key.
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Query string forces files with query strings to be cached and served separately. If you're utilizing query strings for cache busting or to serve separate files based on query string values, this option should be enabled.
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Ignore Cache Control tells StackPath to ignore cache times set by the origin. It lets you set custom caching times within the StackPath control panel. This option must be enabled in order for the Override Cache Control Header option to work.
Origin Information
This option lets you manually define the IP of your website or application.
In case your origin server is behind a dynamic IP, this option should be disabled so StackPath can query DNS for the current IP address.