Check up on your Front-End Cache in TYPO3 – part 3 or 3
Blackfire can help TYPO3 users optimize their front-end cache, for faster page loads and happier visitors.
By Benni Mack, on Apr 30, 2025 Note from the editor: At Blackfire, we believe that performance is a shared responsibility across the tech community. Today, we’re thrilled to share a guest post from b13, a leading agency specializing in TYPO3 solutions.
Known for their deep commitment to quality and performance, the team at b13 brings valuable insights on how to build faster, more reliable applications. We’re excited to welcome their expertise to our blog.
To better observability and beyond!
At b13, we often recommend Blackfire to our customers who want to test and improve their TYPO3 front-end caches. TYPO3 is a PHP-based CMS that works really well with Blackfire—so much so that we’ve been provided a standard set of TYPO3 recommendations for Blackfire since early 2017.
How caching works in TYPO3
Every CMS handles front-end caching a bit differently. When someone requests a TYPO3 website, the TYPO3 Core will check if the page is available in a cache, and if it’s not, it builds and caches all “Cacheable” elements on the first build (including most content, plugins, URLs, and general data). Non-cacheable elements (like content based on feeds or personalized messages, e.g. displaying a user’s name) are requested every time someone visits the site.
Profile the front-end cache in TYPO3
You’ll want to check your first page call and subsequent ones separately because TYPO3 does a lot of work on the “first hit” to create the initial frontend cache. To ensure you capture both types of calls, use a “logged-out” or private browser, then clear the cache. In the Blackfire web extension, check “Disable aggregation” to profile the first build.
After the first call, you can use Blackfire’s profiler with the “Disable aggregation” box unchecked, which will request your website ten times. Compare how long these subsequent requests take with your initial, unaggregated request.
In a website that’s been properly cached, you’d expect a big difference between the page load time for a first request and the next one! If there’s not much of a difference, or if your cached hits are still loading slowly, there’s probably some opportunity to optimize your TYPO3 front-end cache.
Play detective and figure out what’s wrong
Say your website is taking a long time to load on subsequent requests, or what we call “cached hits”. It’s time to take a look at possible problems in your front-end cache. Here are some of the questions we usually ask:
Are there cacheable elements that aren’t being cached?
Look at what’s slowing down your page. If this includes any contents on your page that can be cached, including plugins or page elements that are currently set as “uncacheable” but don’t need to be, consider caching them. An extension author, for example, might have listed a plugin as uncacheable when it’s not.
If nothing’s uncacheable and no users are logged in, you can cache the entire page by a proxy or CDN. Activate “config.sendCacheHeaders” in Typoscript. This will make TYPO3 send HTTP headers which tell your web browser to save your page within the browser’s cache.
Is the no_cache parameter showing up in your URL or TYPO3 admin panel?
The no_cache parameter can be set in the TYPO3 admin panel or appended to a URL as no_cache=1. When the no_cache parameter is set to true (or 1), your website will never be cached. This is hugely disadvantageous from a speed perspective and can open your website up to security vulnerabilities. Make sure this parameter is set to 0 or disabled.
Caption: You can make sure that your no_cache parameter is disabled in the TYPO3 admin panel.
Alt-TexT: Screenshot of TYPO3 backend’s “Configure Installation-Wide options” pop up.
Which page metrics are taking up the most resources and time?
Check your page load time, database queries, and other HTTPS requests. Depending on the issue, you might want to look into your caching backend, the caching lifetime, or other options to speed up your load time.
Consider using Redis to store a cached version of pages in memory. Redis is used by TYPO3 by default, so make sure you have it configured correctly. TYPO3 saw a 30% performance increase when we switched from database-based caching to Redis.
Extend the caching lifetime of your page. By default, TYPO3 stores rendered pages for 24 hours. If the contents of your page are fairly static and unchanging, you can extend the cache lifetime from the default of 24 hours to 30 days or more in the “Behaviour tab” of your TYPO3 page properties.
Enable a crawler extension that triggers first hits
Sometimes your website is resource-intensive, and your “first hit” needs to be slow. You can install crawler extensions, like our warmup extension, that requests your page periodically so that when visitors come to your website, they’re unlikely to get an uncached version.
How Blackfire has helped us in “real life”
We know these methods work because we’ve used them. Once, one of our clients put an RSS feed on their TYPO3 website, but a few months after installing the feed, they called us and said their homepage was taking way too long to load — around four seconds! Even worse, a lot of their visitors were getting 404s, because too many people were visiting their site at the same time and their server couldn’t handle it.
A lot of developers might have a knee-jerk reaction to this problem and suggest more RAM, more servers, or bigger servers. But before agreeing to expensive solutions, I profiled their website with Blackfire and found out that the plugin for their RSS feed wasn’t cached. On every request, the website was loading a massive RSS file — around 4 megabytes of the same file. We realized we could cache the RSS file (allowing it to update around every 30 minutes or so) so that many more people could visit the website, without upgrades to RAM or CPU!
Get in touch
If you need help setting up Blackfire for your TYPO3 website, we recommend the great docs Blackfire has for PHP websites. And if you’re looking for hands-on help, feel free to reach out to us at b13. We run Blackfire workshops to help our clients to get their website monitoring up and running.
Need help or have ideas? Let’s connect
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