Performance

Wagtail is designed for speed, both in the editor interface and on the front-end, but if you want even better performance or you need to handle very high volumes of traffic, here are some tips on eking out the most from your installation.

Editor interface

We have tried to minimise external dependencies for a working installation of Wagtail, in order to make it as simple as possible to get going. However, a number of default settings can be configured for better performance:

Cache

We recommend Redis as a fast, persistent cache. Install Redis through your package manager (on Debian or Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install redis-server), add django-redis to your requirements.txt, and enable it as a cache backend:

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django_redis.cache.RedisCache',
        'LOCATION': '127.0.0.1:6379',
        'OPTIONS': {
            'CLIENT_CLASS': 'django_redis.client.DefaultClient',
        }
    }
}

Database

Wagtail is tested on SQLite, and should work on other Django-supported database backends, but we recommend PostgreSQL for production use.

Templates

The overhead from reading and compiling templates can add up. In some cases a significant performance improvement can be gained by using Django’s cached template loader:

TEMPLATES = [{
    'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
    'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
    'OPTIONS': {
        'loaders': [
            ('django.template.loaders.cached.Loader', [
                'django.template.loaders.filesystem.Loader',
                'django.template.loaders.app_directories.Loader',
            ]),
        ],
    },
}]

There is a caveat associated with this loader though. Changes to a template file will not be picked up once it is cached. This means that this loader should not be enabled during development.

Public users

Caching proxy

To support high volumes of traffic with excellent response times, we recommend a caching proxy. Both Varnish and Squid have been tested in production. Hosted proxies like Cloudflare should also work well.

Wagtail supports automatic cache invalidation for Varnish/Squid. See Frontend cache invalidator for more information.