Speed Optimizer – The All-In-One Performance-Boosting Plugin vs Cache-Control

Good caching policies is one of performance’s best friends, and it can be your new best friend too. Get friendly with intermediary and browser caches by taking control over your WordPress powered website’s HTTP Cache-Control headers. This is not a caching plugin in itself, but will enable you to leverage existing standard compliant caching systems better. You can set different policies for different kinds of pages to suite your website’s needs. The Cache-Control for WordPress plugin allows you to set different policies for shared/intermediary and private caches. The plugin sets some sensible defaults for a medium traffic blog that publishes an update or two per week. You can safely set long Cache-Control times as the max-age values is lowered automatically before a scheduled post is about to be published. Private pages (logged in users, the admin interface, etc.) will not be cached. The plugin has extensive documentation.

The award-winning Speed Optimizer plugin is a free WordPress performance-boosting solution to improve user experience, increase conversion rates and drive more traffic. Achieve better SEO rankings, improve Core Web Vitals and enhance your Google Page Speed Score. Developed by the WordPress speed experts at SiteGround, our free plugin is actively used and trusted by more than 2 million website owners. It’s specially designed to be easy to use, allowing users of all skill levels to make complex speed optimizations, such as minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript, image compression and lazy loading, in a few clicks. Install our caching plugin now to dramatically improve your WordPress website performance on any hosting platform. Essential Speed-boosting Features: Powerful Caching for up to 20% faster website. Frontend Optimizations to minify JS, HTML and CSS, reducing wait time due to the number of scripts and characters in your code Media Optimizations by up to 85% image size compression without sacrificing quality WordPress Environment Optimizations to optimize usage and efficiency of your WordPress site resources Speed Test & tips to get on-demand optimization tips to help your site get even faster Don’t let a slow website compromise your online success. Join the millions of satisfied website owners and see the difference with the free Speed Optimizer plugin. AWARDS: Monster Awards 2022: Best WordPress Optimization Plugin 🥈 Plugin Video Plugin Tutorial To gain in-depth knowledge about our plugin and its functionalities, check our Speed Optimizer Tutorial. It provides detailed information on how to optimize each aspect of your site and maximizes your website performance and cache. CACHING The Caching page gives you full control of your website’s cache, allowing you to enhance its performance significantly. Take advantage of the powerful caching options available to boost your page speed: DYNAMIC CACHING: By enabling Dynamic Caching, all non-static resources of your website are intelligently cached, eliminating the need for repetitive database queries and enhancing page loading speed and TTFB (time to first byte). This default feature is available exclusively for SiteGround servers, ensuring optimal performance. FILE-BASED CACHING: By activating file-based caching, your website generates and stores static HTML versions, ensuring faster loading times and an improved user experience. This efficient caching method stores the cached files conveniently in the browser’s memory, allowing future visitors to access your site swiftly and seamlessly. MEMCACHED: Unleash the power of object caching for your WordPress website. Memcached revolutionizes website performance by storing frequently executed queries to your databases and reusing them for lightning-fast website results. This powerful feature is exclusively available in the SiteGround environment. CACHING SETTINGS: Automatic Cache Purge: ensure the cache is cleared whenever necessary Manual Cache Purge: purge cache manually if you are editing new material and do not have automatic purge activated. Browser-specific Caching: generate caching separately for different browsers Exclude Post Types from Caching: exclude specific post types from being cached Exclude URLs from Caching: exclude specific URLs or utilize wildcards to exclude any sub-pages of a designated “parent-page.” Test URL Caching Status: verify if dynamic caching is actively running on specific URLs ENVIRONMENT OPTIMIZATIONS Optimize and fine-tune your site’s environment for optimal website performance: HTTPS Enforce: Ensure a secure browsing experience for your visitors by effortlessly enabling HTTPS for your site. Say goodbye to insecure content errors and build trust with your audience. Scheduled Database Maintenance: Take control of your database by activating the Database Optimization feature. This functionality removes unnecessary items and optimizes your database tables, leading to improved efficiency and website performance. If you’re using the InnoDB storage engine, table optimisation is automatically handled by the engine itself. Heartbeat Control: Manage the frequency of the WP Heartbeat for different areas of your website. By default, the WordPress Heartbeat API checks for scheduled tasks every 15 seconds on post edit pages and every 60 seconds on the dashboard and front end. With Heartbeat Control, you can adjust the frequency of these checks or even disable them entirely, providing you with greater control over resource allocation. FRONTEND OPTIMIZATIONS Enhance and fine-tune the performance of your website’s front end by minifying JS, HTML and CSS: CSS Tab: Minify CSS files, activate or deactivate CSS combinations to reduce server requests, and even preload combined CSS for optimized performance. Additionally, you can exclude specific styles from being combined or minified, giving you complete control over your CSS optimization. JavaScript Tab: Activate or deactivate Minify JavaScript Files to reduce script sizes and lower the number of server requests. You can also defer render-blocking JavaScript to expedite the initial page speed. Furthermore, you have the ability to exclude specific scripts from various optimisation processes, providing flexibility in optimizing your JavaScript resources. General Tab: Further optimization options include: Web Fonts Optimization: Enhance the loading of Google fonts by adding a preconnect link in your head tag. This informs the browser to establish a connection to Google’s font repository as quickly as possible. Additionally, all other local fonts will be preloaded, resulting in faster caching and rendering. When combined with CSS Combination, we also modify the font-display property to improve rendering speed. Fonts Preloading: With locally hosted fonts being preloaded, you’re allowing browsers to cache and render them at an accelerated pace. Remove Query Strings from Static Resources: Improve caching efficiency by removing query strings from static resources, optimizing their caching capabilities. Disable Emojis: Prevent WordPress from detecting and generating emojis on your pages by disabling emojis support. This helps boost your page speed and improve your website performance. DNS Pre-fetch for External Domains: Enabling the DNS Pre-fetch for a domain will resolve it before resources from it get requested making those resources load faster. MEDIA OPTIMIZATIONS Optimize your website media by reducing image size by up to 85% times while maintaining top-notch quality. Image Compression: Effortlessly compress images to resize your existing images and reduce the space they occupy on your server. The dimensions of the images will remain unchanged, allowing for optimized storage. Fine-tune the compression level and choose whether to create backups of the original images. Please note that image compression feature is exclusive to the SiteGround Environment. WebP Images: Leverage the power of WebP, a cutting-edge image format supported by modern browsers, to significantly reduce the size of your images and skyrocket your page speed. If a browser doesn’t support WebP, the original images will be loaded. Lazy Load Media: Take control of your website’s asset loading with the ability to enable or disable Lazy Load for various assets. You can exclude specific assets such as iframes, videos, thumbnails, widgets, and shortcodes from the dropdown menu. Additionally, you have the option to exclude specific images from the Lazy Load by adding their respective class in the dedicated tab. Maximum Image Width: If you frequently upload large images to your website, you can enable the Maximum Image Width option that automatically resizes existing and future images whose width exceeds 2560 pixels. By optimizing image sizes, you can enhance your website performance and reduce bandwidth usage. You can customize your media optimisation to your specific needs using the filters, we’ve designed for this purpose. SPEED TEST Evaluate the optimization level of your website with Speed Optimizer’s Speed test tool. Our website performance check utilizes the robust capabilities of Google PageSpeed to provide comprehensive insights into your site’s optimization. By conducting the speed test, you will receive detailed results highlighting areas that can be further optimized for enhanced performance. These insights will empower you to fine-tune your website and unlock its maximum potential and increase conversions. Requirements In order to work correctly, this plugin requires that your server meets the following criteria: WordPress 4.7 PHP 7.0+ Our plugin uses a cookie in order to function properly. It does not store personal data and is used solely for the needs of our caching system. Data Collection Collection of technical data is optional and is listed here. This data is collected only for technical analysis, improvements and the possibility to contact the plugin user in case urgent issues need to be fixed (for example a critical security release that needs to be communicated to site owners). The plugin user can manage their preferences within the WP admin to control the collection of technical data. We advise opting in for this data collection, as it can enhance the plugin’s performance. You may find more information on data collection in our Plugins Privacy Notice. Credits Photo credits to Anna Shvets https://www.pexels.com/@shvetsa