Introduction

Plesk includes a built-in Performance Booster tool designed to help you optimize website and server performance quickly and efficiently. Instead of manually adjusting individual settings, the Performance Booster analyzes your hosting configuration and recommends improvements that can enhance speed, reduce load times, and ensure your server is running smoothly.

The tool provides automated suggestions in areas such as caching, compression, PHP optimization, and web server tuning. It also offers an easy way to review and apply enhancements with just a few clicks.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through accessing and using the Performance Booster tool in Plesk.

Getting Started

First and foremost, please ensure you are logged in to your Plesk control panel. To do that, please enter your IP address, hostname, or domain name inside your web browser’s search bar and add “:8443” at the end. It should look something like: “https://yourdomain.com:8443”. By doing so, you will be prompted by a login form that requests your username and password.

After logging in with your username and password, Plesk will automatically display the “Websites & Domains” page, which will serve as the index page from where you can manage everything related to your websites and domains on Plesk.

Accessing the Performance Booster Tool

To open the Performance Booster, please point your attention to the left-hand side of the Plesk control panel and locate the “Tools & Settings” option. Once you do that, please click on it.

Upon doing the above, you will be redirected to the “Tools & Settings” page, and under the “General Settings” section, please click on “Performance Booster”.

This will bring you to the main performance dashboard, where Plesk evaluates your system and suggests improvements.

Understanding the Performance Dashboard

The Performance Booster page will contain a table section with all your domains listed inside. Here you can apply the optimal web server and/or PHP settings to websites to improve their performance. You can measure the result by using an online tool to estimate the performance before and after applying the optimal settings. We recommend using either GTmetrix or Google Pagespeed Insight.

If applying the optimal settings causes unexpected results, you can revert the changes at any moment.

Let’s go through the table section and all its columns so you can get a better idea.

• Name - Under this column, you will see your domain’s name.

• Web Server - Under this column, you will see if the web server is optimized or not. If it is blank, it means the server is not optimized.

• PHP - Under this column, you will see whether the PHP settings and configurations are optimized.

• Speedup - Under this column, you will see how much your website has been optimized by the Performance Booster.

On top of the table section, you will see the “Refresh optimization status” button, which will refresh the domain’s optimization status.

Applying Website-Specific Performance Improvements

To apply a performance boost for one of your domains, please click on the actual domain name.

Performing the action above will open a side menu from the right side ,where you can perform optimizations to the web server and PHP.

Let’s go over the available boosts.

• Optimize the web server - Please put a tick inside the checkbox to enable web server optimization.
• Speed up web server static access - Please place a check in the tickbox to enable optimization for static files, adding a caching type for them.
• Speed up web server compression - Please check this tickbox to enable gzip compression for your website.Optimize
• PHP Settings - Please tick this checkbox to enable JIT compilation and opcode caching for your PHP.
• Switch to modern PHP versions - This checkbox should be ticked by default if your website is already using a modern and up-to-date PHP version. However, if you are using an old one, you can select it to enable it directly from here.

Once you select your desired optimization level, please click on the “Apply” button located  at the bottom of the side menu. Plesk will automatically adjust the necessary settings for you.

IMPORTANT: Performance improvements may result in increased RAM utilization. We recommend monitoring the server for possible out-of-memory events.

Viewing Applied and Completed Improvements

After a brief optimization process that will be signified via a loading screen at the bottom right corner of your Pleks, the process will be finished, and you will receive the optimization status in the table sections where your domains are located.

If there were no errors during the optimization process, the statuses under the “Web Server” and “PHP” should now be labeled as “Optimized”.

To see if the optimizations yielded any positive results, you can use the “Try it” link, located under the “Speedup” column.

Clicking the link above will let you start an internal test in Plesk that shows a before-and-after result. After a while, you will receive the result, and after the applied optimizations, you should definitely see an improvement.

As you can see, in our case, the optimization yielded a 46MS improvement in loading speed, which is quite a lot! 

We received an overall 30% improvement in the TTFB category.

IMPORTANT: Please note that the optimization booster may not always yield great results or any results at all. Website optimization is a very complex task, and in most cases it needs to be reviewed by a professional web developer who can apply optimizations across all areas of the website, including content, code, plugins, modules, themes, and not just web server and PHP configurations.

Applying Server-Wide Optimizations

In addition to optimizing individual sites, Plesk will also provide you with an option to apply server-wide optimizations. To access this functionality, please click on the “Serverwide” tab, located on the right side of the “Domains” tab.

Performing the action above opens the “Serverwide” tab, where you can see all available options. In our case, since this is a default Pleks server, you will only see database optimizations; however, depending on your setup, you may see additional options here. 

To begin the server-wide optimization process, please click on the “Show values to be optimized” link corresponding to the used database server.

Upon doing the above, a side menu will pop up from the right side, which will include various optimization directives. Let’s go over them.

• innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit - Controls the balance between strict ACID compliance for commit operations and higher performance that is possible when commit-related I/O operations are rearranged and done in batches.

• innodb_flush_neighbors - Specifies whether flushing a page from the InnoDB buffer pool also flushes other dirty pages to the same extent.

• innodb_flush_method - Defines the method used to flush data to InnoDB data files and log files, which can affect I/O throughput.

• innodb_io_capacity - The innodb_io_capacity variable defines the number of I/O operations per second (IOPS) available to InnoDB background tasks, such as flushing pages from the buffer pool and merging data from the change buffer.

• innodb_random_read_ahead - Enables the random read-ahead technique for optimizing InnoDB I/O.

• table_open_cache - The number of open tables for all threads.

• innodb_buffer_pool_size - The size in bytes of the buffer pool, the memory area where InnoDB caches table and index data. Note: adjusting this value also affects the "innodb_log_file_size" parameter for optimal performance.

• innodb_log_file_size - The size in bytes of each log file in a log group.

Above these directives, you will see two buttons - “Optimize All” and “Revert all” respectively. Please click the “Optimize All” button to apply the optimal values. If you believe you can do a better job at optimizing your database server, you can also use the drop-down menus available on the side menu and apply optimizations on your own. We discourage such optimizations unless you are intimately familiar with database server optimizations. 

Afterward, you can test your website’s performance, and if it seems degraded, you can use the “Revert all” button to bring back the original settings.

Once you have applied all the desired optimizations, please click on the “Apply” button located at the bottom of the side menu.

The screen will refresh, and you will see that the status of the database server has been changed to “optimized”.

Conclusion

As you can see, the Plesk Performance Booster provides a simple and effective way to improve your server and website speed. By reviewing and applying its recommendations, you can enhance performance, reduce load times, and keep your hosting environment running efficiently - all without manually tracking individual technical settings.

We hope this tutorial was helpful, and we kindly encourage you to check the Performance Booster tool periodically to maintain optimal performance.