Nginx Configuration Best Practices

Welcome dear reader, today we walk through the most useful Nginx configuration practices for hosting your web applications. Nginx is a fast, lightweight web server that also acts as a reverse proxy and load balancer — but a few bad defaults can slow your site down or expose it to unnecessary risks. Let’s make sure your server blocks are clean, fast, and secure.

Table of contents

• What is Nginx and How Does It Work?
• How to Organize Your Server Blocks
• Which Performance Settings Should You Tune?
• Which Security Headers Should You Set?
• Conclusion

What is Nginx and How Does It Work?

Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a web server that receives HTTP requests and answers them — either with static files such as images and HTML, or by forwarding the request to your application. It uses an event-driven architecture, meaning a single Nginx process can handle thousands of simultaneous connections without spawning a thread per request. This is what makes it so fast.

Configuration happens in text files, usually under /etc/nginx/. The main file nginx.conf loads smaller files from conf.d/ and sites-enabled/, where each website lives in its own server block.

How to Organize Your Server Blocks

A server block defines one website. A typical block for a PHP application looks like this:

server {
    # (1) Domain names served by this block
    server_name example.com www.example.com;

    # (2) Document root and entry file
    root /var/www/public_html;
    index index.php index.html;

    # (3) Static assets: cached by the browser
    location ~* \.(css|js|png|jpg|svg)$ {
        expires 30d;
    }

    # (4) Hand off PHP files to PHP-FPM
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
    }
}

The best practice here is one file per site in sites-available/, and a symbolic link into sites-enabled/ — exactly the same pattern as Apache’s virtual hosts in our guide on how to install WordPress on a VPS server.

Which Performance Settings Should You Tune?

Three settings give you the most benefit with the least effort. First, enable gzip compression in nginx.conf so text assets travel compressed:

gzip on;
gzip_types text/css application/javascript application/json;

Second, set sensible timeouts so slow clients do not tie up workers:

client_body_timeout 12s;
keepalive_timeout 15s;
send_timeout 10s;

Third, prefer UNIX sockets over TCP for local PHP-FPM connections (as in the server block above) — it skips the network stack entirely.

After any change, validate the syntax before reloading:

# Test the configuration, then reload without downtime
sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

Which Security Headers Should You Set?

Finally, add a few security headers to your server block. They tell browsers to protect your users, and they cost you nothing:

add_header X-Content-Type-Options nosniff;
add_header X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN;
add_header Referrer-Policy strict-origin-when-cross-origin;

Also, make sure your server does not reveal its version — set server_tokens off; in the http block.

Conclusion

That’s already it for our tour of Nginx best practices. Keep one server block per website, enable gzip and tight timeouts, use UNIX sockets for PHP-FPM, and add the basic security headers. With these habits, your Nginx setup will stay fast and safe as it grows. Leave a comment below if you have any questions or feedback about the content of this article.

At re:Software S.L., we create innovative solutions for businesses that aim to digitize their processes and routines, and our expertise with nginx helps us maintain your servers uptime and bandwidth.