Problem with SEO and headers generated by your code
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I tested many cache, minify and performance improvement plugins and yours is giving me by far the best results in GT Metrix, Page Speed Insights, tools.pigndom.com.
It took me a lot of testing but I got it to a point where it makes a huge difference in speed and scores (in GT Metrix went from a low B to a mid level A. In page insights from mobile score of about 45 to 84 and desktop from about 80 to 96), however, it has a massive glitch, when I run professional SEO tools to see how they respond to the header your plugin injects it can either cause huge random discrepancies on results, the response freezing or giving very different scores each time, so the speed score is great but the SEO scores are terrible and the whole purpose of improving speed was to get search engine positions. Something is wrong with the headers your plugin generates.
I found consistently in REDbot the same warnings in the header generated after your plugin, before your plugin my headers are perfect, they pass all tests and give the same results consistently, after your plugin I get this:
Content Negotiation (Content Negotiation response )
The compressed response is negotiated, but doesn’t have an appropriate Vary header.
The resource doesn’t send Vary consistently.
The response body is different when content negotiation happens.Caching
This response allows all caches to store it.
This response cannot be served from cache without validation.I have tested different changes in my .htacess files but it appears the problem is not coming from there. The vary settings and other things appear to be coming from some other thing your plugin does.
How can I make changes on your files so I remove those errors and warnings?
BTW I am using in conjunction with Rank Math and WebP Converter for Media but those 2 are not causing header errors when testing.
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Hello, I did a lot of research on this the past few hours, the problem comes from the parameters by GZIP compression from the source (Apache) and the settings you have I found to be the industry standard so the problem is definitely not coming from your end, it is from Easy Apache 4 and probably the new mod_deflate I updated recently when I moved to HTTP2.
Your plugin was triggering it when selecting to use GZIP Compression, but then I deactivated it and reconfigured via Cpanel my GZIP and I still had the same headers and problem. So your plugin appeared to cause it due to your plugin enabling GZIP.I found a super interesting article that shows a way to narrow the vary settings to 2 options (compressed encoded and the regular file) that should do the trick.
These are the parameters I found everywhere for GZIP and I believe are identical to what you use:
# Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-AgentUnfortunately dealing with apache via Cpanel/WHM can be cumbersome but I will play with that in the next couple of days.
Someone suggests adding this:
if (req.restarts == 0) {
# normalize Accept-Encoding to reduce vary
if (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ “gzip”) {
set req.http.Accept-Encoding = “gzip”;
} else {
unset req.http.Accept-Encoding;
}
}Thanks, the problem was not your Plugin.
And BTW, I read lots of posts here in the support section for your plugin and I get the feeling many people do not know how to configure it because I played around with at least 15 others and yours gave me the best performance numbers by a big margin. It took a while to set it up right but once I was done the results were awesome. A close 2nd is Hummmingbird but yours is simpler and pre-loading the pages makes a huge difference in numbers.
Your plugin (and a wonderful plugin called Plugin Load Filter)have brought a massive website I have that uses over 40 plugins! to an A rating or high B in most test systems and in SEO analysis I get to 79 to 85 in score. I never dreamed that would be possible but tweaking a million things plus your plugin I am confident I will be able to position at least 200 pages very high in rankings on google.
Thanks!
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