How to reduce the number of executions generated by your website?
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To achieve a good website performance, it is very important to optimize the number of executions. The most common cause for an excessively high number of executions is either something irregular happening to your website that should be addressed and stopped or, in the better case, a legitimate peak in your website traffic, which can also be addressed and handled.
Use the Traffic tool and Account Statistics to identify irregularities that cause a high number of executions
Check your Domain Hits Stats and Account Executions and Scripts from your Client Area > Services > Hosting > Manage > Statistics.
To reduce the number of executions generated by your website, you have to identify the source of the issue. Sometimes the high number of executions is not created by a high number of legitimate visitors and you may be able to lower it by taking some corrective actions.
Check out the most commonly visited URLs and the visitor countries that have accessed your website from Site Tools > Statistics -> Traffic. This will help you pinpoint problematic parts of your website and figure out where to focus your efforts.
The Behaviour tab provides you with useful information about which part of your website is most viewed. You should check this section to identify the pages that generate the executions. Below we will talk about the most common execution generators:
- Chat/calendar or other modules that refresh their content constantly can generate many executions, and you will be able to see the executions in this section. For example, if your site uses a calendar module and you see that the calendar.php script has been accessed many times, then it is a good idea to disable this module.
- Application login pages. Very often, sites are abused by bots that try to gain administrative access. If you see many requests to your site’s admin login page (Joomla! 3.x administrator folder, WordPress wp-admin.php, etc.) you can do two things:
- Password protect your administrative folder
- Allow access only from certain IP addresses by adding simple .htaccess rules.
- Comments sections. Very often, sites are abused by bots that try to post spam comments. If you see many requests to your site’s comments section (WordPress wp-comments.php, Joomla! 3.x JComments, etc.), then add CAPTCHA that will show an image to your visitors before allowing them to post a comment to prevent bot’s requests. There are many CAPTCHA extensions for WordPress, Joomla! 3.x, Drupal, etc. that you can use to protect your site’s comments section/contact forms.
As you probably know, search engines use bots to index websites on the Internet. Those visits to your website are recorded and shown in the Behaviour tab. Sometimes bots generate too many executions and you need to either block the bots or decrease their crawl rate. If you notice too many requests from certain bots, you can change their crawl rate. The way you set the crawl rate depends on the particular bot.
Use the SuperCacher to handle executions generated by legitimate high traffic
In some cases, the number of executions is too high because your site has become too popular or because you’ve recently launched a new marketing campaign. If this is the case, then a possible solution is to configure your site to use our SuperCacher service. To reduce the number of executions, you need to enable the SuperCacher Dynamic cache feature. Once you enable Dynamic Caching, the SuperCacher will generate cached copies of your site’s pages. When a new user attempts to open one of the pages, it will be served from the cache instead of generating a new execution.
Switch to a higher PHP version
Make sure you’re using the latest PHP version available for your account. To update your PHP version, go to your Site Tools > Devs > PHP Manager.
Keep Your Application Up-to-date and Clean Unused Plugins
Keep your web applications up to date and deactivate and delete all plugins and extensions currently not used.