Site performance is crucial when creating applications on the modern web. It has a direct impact on user experience, search engine rankings, and user conversion rates. With WordPress on Azure App Service, we're committed to hosting a site that helps you deliver the best results for your users at a global scale.
We are announcing the preview of Azure Front Door integration with WordPress on Azure App Service enables faster page loads, enhanced security, and increased reliability for your global apps with no configuration or additional code required. This integration help improve the site performance by delivering your content using Microsoft's global edge network with hundreds of global and local points of presence. Access to the static and dynamic content of your WordPress application is accelerated by caching static content at the edge server and using split TCP method to reduce connection establishment time among others.
Figure 1: Azure Front Door's Global Points of Presence (POP) and global network.
This new feature includes enhanced protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, significantly reduces latency, and helps increase throughput for your global users.
Improves page speed
Today, with WordPress on Azure App Service, when a user visits your site, our HTTP load balancer will determine the closest node to their location and serve your application from there. If any of our global regions is down, we intelligently re-route your user's requests to the closest healthy node in the network. This enables you to build your application resiliently across regions, failover instantly, and offer your users an "always-on" website availability. Enabling this integration further increases your global presence by caching your website’s static content across 118+ points of presence (POP) across 100 metro cities. As a result, your app runs with lower latency and higher throughput to your end-users. Azure Front Door continuously monitors the web application. The service provides automatic failover to the next available site when the nearest site is unavailable.
Resources Deployed
WordPress with AFD enabled deploys the following resources to AFD profile
- AFD Endpoint
- AFD Route
- Origin group
- Ruleset
Ruleset (2 Rules) :
- First rule defines caching and compression behavior for wp-content/uploads files and determines the origin source (blob storage / app service)
- Second rule defines caching and compression behavior for other static files of specific extension
Support and Feedback
Try out the feature from here: https://aka.ms/wpafd
For more details on configuring WordPress site with AFD, refer to AFD integration with WordPress on Azure App Service.
In case you need any support, you can open a support request at New support request - Microsoft Azure.
For more details about the offering, please visit Azure/wordpress-linux-appservice (github.com)
If you have any ideas about how we can make WordPress on Azure App Service better, please post your ideas at Post idea · Community (azure.com) or you could email us at wordpressonazure@microsoft.com to start a conversation.