What's New in NitroPack: App Widgets, Graphs, and In-Depth Stats

“Don’t waste customers’ time asking them questions unless you’re prepared to act on what they say.” - Bruce Temkin.

Last year we got the chance to speak with some of you during our customer discovery initiative and get your feedback on what you like about NitroPack and what we could do better.

What stood out to us was your desire to better understand how NitroPack optimizes your websites or, as some of you put it, “figure out how the magic happens.” 

That’s why in the last couple of months, we have been working hard on lifting NitroPack’s hood and showing more of what our service does behind the scenes.

And in the following paragraphs, we will present to you phase 1 (yes, there will be phase 2, but more on that later) of the improved NitroPack dashboard.

Let’s begin!

New Widgets, More Statistics, In-Depth Information

Here’s a complete list of all new additions to your NitroPack dashboard:

• New Widget: Total Cache Status
• New Feature: NitroPack Service Status
• New Cache Size Widget in the Cache Status Menu
• Usage Log Improvements: New Event Status, Resource Usage Graph, and Connector History Section

New Widget: Total Cache Status

Previously, you could see the total current number of optimized pages in the top widget of your NitroPack dashboard:

However, after reflecting on some common questions that our customer support team receives, we are now showing not only the number of optimized pages but also the number of pending and failed optimizations to provide you with a better overview of your site’s optimization status.

To achieve that, we moved the optimized pages metric into a separate widget:

New Feature: NitroPack Service Status

We wanted to make it even easier for you to learn if NitroPack isn’t operational or if we are in the process of performing scheduled maintenance. 

That’s why we integrated a live status feature into the dashboard:

In case, the status is yellow or red you can click the info button and access status.nitropack.io from the "More info" link: 

There you will find detailed information. 

New Cache Size Widget in the Cache Status Menu

To more clearly communicate what information is available in the Optimization menu, we renamed it to Cache Status.

Inside, you’re going to find two new widgets, Total Cache Status and Total Cache Size.

We’ve already discussed the Total Cache Status widget, which is included on the home page of your dashboard. You can easily access the Cache Status menu through the 'View details' link in the Total Cache Status widget:

Total Cache Size is a widget that will give you an overview of the current amount of optimized cache files stored on NitroPack’s servers.

A question that might arise when looking at the widget is: “What cache size is a good one?”

A cache size that is two or three times larger than the size of your website is considered normal. Anything close to zero or abnormally high numbers might indicate issues, and in such cases, do not hesitate to contact us.

Usage Log Improvements: New Event Status, Resource Usage Graph, and Connector History Section

As far as the Service Usage Log panel is concerned, we didn’t only change its name to Logs, but we also introduced a couple of improvements and added a brand new section.

Firstly, we’ve added a new “Optimization failure” event to the Cache API table, as well as the reason for the particular optimization to fail:

Secondly, we’ve upgraded the Resource Usage panel by introducing a second graph visually displaying which resources use the most CDN bandwidth:

And added the same information in numbers in the table below:

Finally, we’ve released a brand new section - “Connector History,” where you can find all the events that we detected with the connector:

In other words, every action (e.g., connect, disconnect, update, disable, etc.) you take with your WordPress, Magento, or OpenCart NitroPack plugin will be added to the table and listed in chronological order.
 

Our Plans for Phase 2 (What More to Expect)

Everything we’ve done up until this point is phase 1 of our project to show you what’s under NitroPack’s hood and how the “magic” works. 

But that’s not all we got planned. We have already started working on phase 2 when we’re going to introduce even more enhancements, graphs, and statistics. 

Here’s what’s coming next to NitroPack’s dashboard:

• Number of Optimized Cache Variations. Similar to the information we provide with the number of optimized pages, we want to add the number of optimized cache variations and include new “Expired” status for each variation.
   
• Resource Optimization Logs Widget. We will enrich your dashboard with one more widget that will show aggregate information about the optimization process of a resource (e.g., how the process went, what went right/wrong, data saved, etc.)
   
• Cache Warmup and Webhook Logs. Similar to the resource optimization logs, we want to release cache warmup and webhook logs to give a deeper overview of the process.
   
• Daily Core Web Vitals Widget. It’s of great importance to us to show NitroPack’s real-world impact. To do that, we aim to add a Core Web Vitals widget that will measure your site’s performance on a daily basis instead of the regular 28-day collection period. This way, you can precisely identify which changes impact your site, which is nearly impossible to do when waiting almost a month for the new data to come in.

In a nutshell, a lot of exciting stuff is on the horizon. If you don’t want to miss it, follow our blog and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube channel.