Advanced Settings

• Logging
• Work Directory
• Network
  • HTTP Timeout
  • HTTP Delay
  • HTTP Concurrency
  • Downgrade HTTPS to HTTP
• HTTP Authentication
  • Username
  • Password
• SSL Certificates
  • Verification
  • CA Bundle Path
• Crawler
  • Custom Origin URL
  • Page Not Found Path
  • Process page not found resources
  • Enforce lowercase URLs
  • HTML DOM parser
• Publication Task Timeout
• Publish Changes
  • Update Archive Pages
  • Exclude Specific Taxonomies
  • Exclude Author Archives
  • Exclude Date Archives
  • Additional URLs
• Plugin Uninstall
  • Delete plugin settings
  • Delete plugin data

The Advanced Settings allow you to tweak and tune the way Staatic works.

Logging

Logging level determines the amount of information captured during publications, influencing both troubleshooting capability and publication performance.

• No logging: disables all logging, maximizing performance. Use when logging is unnecessary.
• Basic logging: records critical events like errors, ideal for everyday operation with minimal performance impact.
• Detailed logging: includes crawler and deployment events, offering more insight for problem-solving with moderate performance impact.
• Extensive logging: captures comprehensive details including debug messages for in-depth troubleshooting, significantly affecting performance.

By default Logging is set to Minimal Logging. This is the recommended value in most cases. We recommend increasing the level of logging only while troubleshooting.

Work Directory

While publishing the static version of your WordPress site, a copy of your dynamic WordPress site is crawled and converted into static files. These files will be stored within the work directory. Also depending on the Staatic features and deployment method you are using, other temporary files will be stored here.

By default the Work Directory is set to a sub directory of the WordPress uploads directory (e.g. /wp-content/uploads/staatic). Depending on filesystem permissions another directory may need to be chosen.

Network

At various stages during a publication Staatic will need to perform HTTP requests, e.g. to crawl your dynamic WordPress site or to query our API to enable form handling or search. These settings can be changed to improve publication performance as well as limit the load on your server.

HTTP Timeout

By default the HTTP Timeout is set to 60 seconds. This should work in most circumstances. If your experiencing problems, you can increase the value.

HTTP Delay

By default the HTTP Delay is set to 0 milliseconds. In case the value is set to anything above 0, requests will be delayed by this amount of milliseconds.

This can be used to decrease load on the server that hosts your dynamic WordPress site and can be useful on shared servers with multiple sites where the performance of other sites would otherwise be affected negatively.

HTTP Concurrency

By default the HTTP Concurrency is set to 4 concurrent HTTP request. In order to significantly increase the publication performance, you can increase this value.

Be careful not to set this value too high or it may negatively impact the overall server performance. Depending on the specifications of the server any value between 1 and 8 should be safe.

Downgrade HTTPS to HTTP while crawling site

By default the Downgrade HTTPS to HTTP is disabled. Enabling this option will cause internal crawl requests from Staatic to the WordPress instance to be forced over the HTTP protocol.

This option can be enabled in cases where WordPress is behind a HTTPS terminating load balancer. This is only an issue when WordPress itself is not directly available via HTTPS (the external load balancer takes care of that) and the site address resolves to this local WordPress instance that only accepts HTTP.

HTTP Authentication

If you are using HTTP (basic) authentication to restrict access to your dynamic WordPress installation, Staatic requires a valid username and password combination. Otherwise it is unable to crawl your dynamic site successfully.

Note: we highly recommend that you setup a dedicated account for Staatic. This is to prevent Staatic from failing when a regular user makes any changes to his/her username or password.

Username

The username for the HTTP authentication.

Password

The password for the HTTP authentication.

SSL Certificates

These settings determine if and how SSL certificates are verified during requests.

Verification

This setting describes the SSL certificate verification behavior of a request.

• Set to “Enabled” to enable SSL certificate verification and use the default CA bundle provided by operating system.
• Set to “Disabled” to disable certificate verification (this is insecure!).
• Set to “Enabled using custom certificate” to provide the path to a CA bundle to enable verification using a custom certificate.

By default the SSL certificates Verification behavior is set to “Enabled“. If your server is using self signed certificates, either change its value to “Enabled using custom certificate” or “Disabled“.

Note: setting the value to “Disabled” disables SSL certificate verification completely and is insecure. Use with caution!

CA Bundle Path

This setting is only relevant in case “Verification” is set to “Enabled using custom certificate” and should be the path to the certificate, e.g. “/path/to/cert.pem“.

Crawler

These settings allow you to change certain aspects of the crawler component. The crawler component is responsible for crawling all pages and assets of your dynamic site and prepares these for further processing.

Custom Origin URL

The Custom Origin URL setting specifies the entry point for the crawling process, ideally targeting the homepage of your dynamic WordPress site. This feature is particularly beneficial for scenarios requiring the crawler to initiate from an alternative URL, enabling refined control over which content is included in the static site conversion.

By default, the crawler utilizes the WordPress site’s address, configured in WP-Admin > Settings > General > Site Address (URL), as its starting point. You can specify a different URL to customize the starting point, accommodating unique site structures or staging environments.

Note: for advanced customization, you can programmatically set the origin URL by either defining the STAATIC_SITE_URL environment variable or hooking into the staatic_site_url filter. This allows for dynamic adjustments based on the environment or specific development needs.

Page Not Found Path

This is the page that will be crawled to define the (404) page not found page.

By default the Page Not Found Path is set to /404_not_found/. If you have a specific 404 page on your dynamic WordPress site, e.g. /my_custom_404.html, then feel free to change the path here.

Process page not found resources

By default Process page not found resources is disabled. When enabled, in addition to the configured page not found page, other resources with a 404 status code will be included in the build as well.

In most cases having a single 404 page not found resource deployed is sufficient, since this is usually configured to be the shared 404 page used by the web server. In case you have unique 404 pages for specific URLs, you can enable this setting to have them processed and deployed as well.

Enforce lowercase URLs

By default Enforce lowercase URLs is disabled. When enabled, it ensures that all internal links, resources, and references within the static version of your site adhere to a uniform lowercase format.

This feature is designed to ensure consistent formatting across your site’s URLs and to help prevent the creation of duplicate content due to case sensitivity. By standardizing URLs to lowercase, Staatic helps in maintaining a cleaner, more SEO-friendly site structure, as search engines may treat URLs with varying case as distinct pages, potentially impacting search rankings.

HTML DOM parser

The HTML DOM (Document Object Model) parser is responsible for understanding and manipulating the HTML structure of posts and pages in order to allow the static version of your site to be generated.

Due to the nature of the HTML DOM, different HTML DOM parsers all handle HTML slightly different and also vary in performance. In order to support as many cases as possible, Staatic supports multiple external libraries.

• HTML5-PHP
  HTML5-PHP is a standards-compliant HTML5 parser and writer. It is stable and used in many production websites.
• PHP DOM Wrapper
  PHP DOM Wrapper is a simple but powerful DOM wrapper library to traverse and manipulate HTML documents.
• Simple Html Dom Parser
  Another popular HTML DOM parser, having the ability to leave unmanipulated parts of the HTML DOM as much as is, when it comes to non-wellformed HTML code and HTML entities.

By default, since Staatic for WordPress v1.4.0, HTML DOM parser is set to PHP DOM Wrapper. Up to v1.3.4 the default (and only supported HTML DOM parser) is Simple Html Dom Parser.

According to our benchmarks, HTML DOM parser performed better when processing large sites. If you are experiencing issues with the generated static HTML, you can try a different parser.

Note: if you are using Alpine.js shorthand syntax in your HTML, you will need to use Simple Html Dom Parser in order for the @event attributes to be retained.

Publication Task Timeout

This setting determines how long individual publication tasks may take before timing out and only applies to publications started from within WP-Admin. Publications started using WP-CLI are less constrained and usually not time limited.

By default the Publication Task Timeout is set to 180 seconds.

Take the following into consideration when changing this value:

• If set too high, publications may fail due to web server timeouts (request timeout).
• If set too low, publications may fail due to long running tasks timing out.

Note: only change this value to troubleshoot publication issues. Alternatively use the WP-CLI Publish Command.

Publish Changes

The Publish Changes function becomes available when modifications are made to posts or pages, enabling only the revised content to be processed and reflected on the static version of the site. It ensures that both the updated pages and the related ones linking to them are processed accordingly.

These settings provide the capability to specify which related pages are to be included or explicitly omitted in the update process, providing enhanced control over the content that is refreshed on the live site.

Note: This functionality is part of Staatic Premium Edition.

Update Archive Pages

By default Update Archive Pages is enabled. With this option enabled, linked taxonomy, author, and date archive pages associated with any modified posts and pages are updated as well.

Exclude Specific Taxonomies

By default Exclude Specific Taxonomies is set to include only Formats (post_format). This setting permits the exclusion of linked archive pages for designated taxonomies from being updated throughout the publication process.

Exclude Author Archives

By default Exclude Author Archives is enabled. This setting permits the exclusion of linked author archive pages from being updated throughout the publication process.

Exclude Date Archives

By default Exclude Date Archives is enabled. This setting permits the exclusion of linked date archive pages from being updated throughout the publication process.

Additional URLs

This setting enables the configuration of specific URLs that are always processed when utilizing the Publish Changes function.

Examples of additional URLs that can be considered include:

• /
• /wp-sitemap.xml

Plugin Uninstall

These settings allow you to change which data is deleted when uninstalling the Staatic plugin. If you want to uninstall the plugin and are not planning to reinstall the plugin at a later time, you can enable all options below.

Delete plugin settings

When enabled, this will make sure all of the plugin’s settings and options registered with WordPress are deleted when uninstalling the plugin.

Delete plugin data

When enabled, this will make sure all of the plugin’s database tables are deleted when uninstalling the plugin.

Note: The Work Directory needs to be deleted manually at the moment.