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Acceleration

Acceleration enables HTML caching and minification for your site. When enabled, smoxy caches your HTML pages at the edge and optionally removes unnecessary whitespace and comments to reduce file sizes — resulting in faster page loads and lower origin server load.

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What Acceleration Does

Without acceleration, every HTML request is forwarded to your origin server. With acceleration enabled:

  1. smoxy caches HTML responses at the edge

  2. Subsequent visitors receive the cached HTML directly from smoxy — no origin request needed

  3. Optionally, HTML is minified before caching to reduce transfer size

This is particularly effective for pages that don't change on every request, such as product pages, blog posts, or landing pages.

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Settings

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HTML Caching

Setting
Default

acceleration_enabled

Disabled

When enabled, smoxy caches HTML responses (text/html) alongside static assets. The cache TTL configured in Advanced Caching applies to HTML content as well.

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HTML Minification

Setting
Default

minify_html

Disabled

When enabled, smoxy removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and line breaks from HTML responses. This reduces the HTML file size sent to visitors.

HTML minification can be enabled independently of HTML caching, but the combination of both provides the best performance improvement.

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Enabling Acceleration

  1. Navigate to your Site in smoxy

  2. Open the Acceleration settings

  3. Toggle HTML Caching on

  4. Optionally enable Minify HTML

  5. Save

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When to Use Acceleration

Good candidates for acceleration:

  • Product pages, category pages, blog posts

  • Landing pages and marketing pages

  • Documentation and help pages

  • Any page where the HTML doesn't change per visitor

Not suitable for acceleration:

  • Pages with personalized content (user dashboards, shopping carts)

  • Pages that must always reflect real-time data

  • API endpoints returning dynamic JSON

For pages with mixed content (e.g., a product page with a personalized cart widget), consider using SSI/ESI to cache the static parts separately from the dynamic fragments.

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Per-Request Overrides

You can override acceleration settings for specific requests using Conditional Rules. This allows you to:

  • Enable caching only for specific URL paths

  • Disable caching for logged-in users

  • Apply minification selectively

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Important Considerations

  • Requires smoxy to be enabled: Acceleration only works when the smoxy proxy is active on your site (the "Enable smoxy" toggle in Basic Configuration).

  • Cache invalidation: When you update your HTML content, purge the cache to ensure visitors see the latest version. See Cache Invalidation.

  • Cache TTL applies: HTML cache follows the same TTL setting as other cached content. Configure the TTL in Advanced Caching.

  • Cookie vary matters: If your HTML content varies by cookies (e.g., language, logged-in state), configure cookie vary in Advanced Caching to avoid serving the wrong cached version.

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