Surge Reviews, Downloads & Maintenance

Surge generates and serves static HTML files for your WordPress site, causing quicker requests, faster load times and a shorter time to first byte (TTFB).

Surge does not require configuration, and has no options. It works out of the box on any well-configured hosting platform. Cached files are stored on disk, and automatically invalidated when your site is updated.

In various load tests, Surge has shown to easily handle 1000-2500 requests per second at 100 concurrent, on a small single-core server with only 1 GB of RAM. That’s over 70 times faster than a stock WordPress install.

Installation

Via the WordPress Dashboard: navigate to Plugins – Add New. In the search bar type “surge” and hit Enter. Find the Surge plugin in the search results, hit Install, then Activate.

Manually: download the Surge plugin .zip file from WordPress.org. In your WordPress admin navigate to Plugins – Add New – Upload. Select the .zip file and hit Upload. Activate the plugin after upload is successful.

Manually via FTP: download the Surge plugin .zip file from WordPress.org, extract the archive, make sure the directory is called “surge”. Use your FTP/SFTP client to upload the “surge” directory to wp-content/plugins. Then activate the plugin in your WordPress admin from the Plugins section.

Using WP-CLI: wp plugin install surge –activate

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the plugin configuration screen?

There isn’t one.

How do I clear the cache?

Toggle the plugin activation or run wp surge flush using WP-CLI.

Is my cache working?

Visit the Site Health screen under Tools in your WordPress dashboard. Common caching errors, like installation problems, etc. will appear there. Otherwise, open your site in an Incognito window to see the cached version. You could also look for the “X-Cache” header in the server response.

Why am I getting cache misses?

Below are a few common reasons:

You are logged into your WordPress site
You have a unique cookie set in your browser
A unique query parameter will also cause a cache miss, except common marketing parameters, such as utm_campaign, etc.
Request methods outside of GET and HEAD are not cached

Can I exclude page X from being cached?

Of course. If you pass a “Cache-Control: no-cache” header (or max-age=0) the request will automatically be excluded from cache. Note that most WordPress plugins will already do this where necessary.

fpassthru() has been disabled for security reasons

It seems like your hosting provider disabled the fpassthru() function, likely by mistake. This is a requirement for Surge. Please get in touch with them and kindly ask them to enable it.

How can I support Surge?

If you like Surge, consider giving us a star on GitHub and a review on WordPress.org.

Review feed

DannyCooper

1/5/2022

Focused

This plugin does one thing: generate and serve static HTML files. And it does that one thing perfectly.

Anna Ladoshkina

1/31/2022

Great job!

It really helps to improve speed A LOT without any hassle with options.

Jordi Cabot

2/16/2022

Hassle-free option - Works out-of-the-box

I just installed Surge in all my sites. After cancelling the payment option I was using, I was looking for a simple and easy to install option. And Surge is exactly this. Forget about complex configuration options (where you're at risk of crashing your site, talking from my own experience!), just install and forget!. I don't know if it's really the fastest option if you're an optimization expert that know exactly what to touch but it's the fastest option for me, no doubt about it

Timi Wahalahti

1/24/2023

Just works!

This plugin works! Install, activate, and check WP_CACHE value and boom - your site is fast!One nice feature that is happening under the hood is caching of specific REST API requests. That makes, for example, dynamic parts of the site with javascript filtering blazingly fast.

Jason LeMahieu (MadtownLems)

2/6/2024

Finally a Caching Plugin I can get behind!

Over the years, I've looked at all the top caching plugins, and never found one that I liked. They were either too complex, too finicky, or tried to do too many things. Surge just works, and it works great. Update: I ran some basic performance testing of the same sample content with and without Surge activated.Surge increased my Requests per second by a factor of 21x and reduced my time per request by a factor of 25x. Beyond that, Konstantin has been amazing as far as support goes for a free plugin. Besides addressing issues and requests, he's gone above-and-beyond at helping work through issues, to the point of looking at where we are using Surge and making additional configuration recommendations. If it were possible to give 6 stars, I would!

Screenshots

No screenshots available

Changelog

1.1.0

Improved Multisite compatibility
Fixed occasional stat() warnings in cleanup routines
Fixed expiration by path being too broad
Added a filter for flush actions
Feature: added a simple events system for s-maxage and stale-while-revalidate support

1.0.5

Fix woocommerce_product_title compatibility
Honor DONOTCACHEPAGE constant
Use built-in is_ssl() WordPress function for better compatibility

1.0.4

Add a WP-CLI command to invalidate/flush page cache
Fix redirect loop with Core’s redirect_canonical for ignore_query_vars
Fix warnings for requests with empty headers
Fix warnings when cron cleanup attempts to read a file that no longer exists
Add a filter to disable writing to wp-config.php

1.0.3

Invalidate cache when posts_per_page is changed
Fix redirect loop with unknown query vars caused by Core’s redirect_canonical
Ignore X-Cache and X-Powered-By headers from cache metadata
Allow multiple headers with the same name

1.0.2

Fix PHP notice in invalidation
Protect against race conditions when writing flags.json
Add support for more post statuses in transition_post_status invalidation

1.0.1

Add support for custom user configuration
Various invalidation enhancements and fixes
Remove advanced-cache.php when plugin is deactivated
Add a note about fpassthru() in FAQ
Minor fix in Site Health screen tests

1.0.0

Anonymize requests to favicon.ico and robots.txt
Improve cache expiration, add cache expiration by path

0.1.0

Initial release

Back to plugins