The Dashboard at a Glance

The Cyclone Static Dashboard (Cyclone Static → Dashboard) is your command center. It shows the current state of the cache, flags any system problems, and gives you the action buttons you’ll use during setup and maintenance.

Enable / Disable Toggle

The large button at the top of the dashboard toggles Cyclone Static on and off without deactivating the plugin.

When disabled, Cyclone removes its .htaccess rules immediately. Apache stops serving static files and all traffic falls through to live WordPress. Your cached files remain on disk — re-enabling restores static serving instantly without regenerating anything.

Use this toggle when you need to troubleshoot a display issue and want to quickly confirm whether Cyclone is responsible. Toggle off, test, toggle on. No deactivation required.

Stat Cards

Queue Depth

The number of URLs currently waiting to be fetched and cached. During initial generation this number will be high and should decrease steadily. Under normal operation it should hover near zero — a persistently high queue indicates WP-Cron may not be running reliably on your server.

If the queue never drains, check that wp-cron.php can run: visit Settings → Advanced and check the Loopback status, or install the WP Crontrol plugin to verify scheduled events are firing.

Cached Pages

The total number of pages that have been cached and are currently being served as static files. This count reflects the number of index.html files Cyclone has written to the cache directory.

Cache Size

The total disk space used by the static file cache. This includes the HTML files plus any pre-compressed .gz and .br variants. A typical WordPress page generates 50–300 KB of cached files (including compressed variants). A 1,000-page site will typically use 100–600 MB.

Disk Available

The free disk space remaining on the partition where the cache directory lives. Cyclone color-codes this indicator:

• Green — plenty of space available (above the Warning threshold)
• Yellow / Caution — free space is below the Warning threshold (default: 20% free)
• Red / Critical — free space is below the Critical threshold (default: 10% free)

Both thresholds are configurable under Settings → Advanced. If you run a large site on a small disk, consider lowering the warning threshold so you get an earlier heads-up.

System Info Panel

The System Info panel runs a quick health check every time the Dashboard loads. Green checkmarks mean everything is working. Yellow or red indicators flag issues that may affect performance or functionality.

.htaccess Rules

Confirms that Cyclone’s rewrite rules are present in your .htaccess file. If this shows a warning, static files will not be served — Apache doesn’t know to look for them. Click Settings → Save Settings (without changing anything) to force a rules rewrite, or visit Settings → Permalinks and click Save to trigger Apache rule regeneration, then return to Dashboard.

PHP Version

Your current PHP version. Cyclone requires PHP 8.0 or later.

Gzip Compression

Cyclone pre-compresses every cached HTML file as a .gz file at generation time. Apache serves the .gz file directly to browsers that support gzip encoding (effectively all of them), with zero per-request compression overhead. This row shows whether gzip compression is available (it always is — PHP’s zlib is a core module) and whether compressed files are currently present in the cache.

Brotli Compression

When the PHP brotli_compress extension is installed, Cyclone also generates a .br file for every cached page. Brotli typically achieves 15–25% better compression than gzip. Apache serves the best variant each browser supports — Brotli first, then gzip, then uncompressed.

If this row shows the extension is not installed, the indicator will explain how to install it for your server environment. Note that even without the PHP extension, if your Apache server has mod_brotli active, your visitors are still receiving Brotli-compressed responses dynamically — Cyclone’s pre-compression just avoids repeating that compression work on every request.

Cache Directory

The absolute path where Cyclone is writing static files. By default this is wp-content/cyclone-static/. The directory must be writable by your web server user. If Cyclone cannot write to this directory, no files will be generated. You can change the directory under Settings → General.

W3 Total Cache

If W3 Total Cache is active, Cyclone detects it and routes CDN purge requests through W3TC’s purge system. This row confirms whether W3TC integration is active. See Removing W3 Total Cache Safely if you plan to remove W3TC after installing Cyclone.

Action Buttons

Discover from Sitemap

Fetches your Yoast SEO sitemap index and recursively reads all sub-sitemaps to collect every URL your site exposes to search engines. This includes post and page URLs, category archives, tag archives, author archives, and pagination pages. All discovered URLs are added to the generation queue.

Use this for initial cache seeding and whenever you want to ensure the complete site is cached. It is safe to run at any time — URLs already in the cache will simply be regenerated.

Requires Yoast SEO. If you use a different SEO plugin, use Generate All instead and consider adding taxonomy archive URLs manually.

Generate All

Queues all published posts and pages for (re)generation. Does not include taxonomy archives (categories, tags) or author archives. Use this if you don’t have Yoast SEO, or after making a global change such as a theme update that affects every page.

Process Now

Triggers a single immediate cron batch outside of the normal schedule. Useful during initial setup to verify that generation is working, or to quickly process a small queue without waiting for the next scheduled cron run.

This does not run the entire queue — it runs one batch of the configured batch size. Click it a few times to process several batches in sequence.

Clear All Cache

Deletes every static file in the cache directory and, if a CDN is configured, sends a full purge request to the CDN. WordPress will serve all traffic live until pages are regenerated.

Use this after a major site redesign (theme change, global CSS update) where you want to force all pages to regenerate from scratch. After clearing, use Discover from Sitemap or Generate All to queue everything for regeneration.

Note: During the period between clearing and regeneration, your site is fully functional — visitors receive live WordPress responses. There is no downtime. The only difference is increased server load until the cache rebuilds.