SQLite Object Cache vs Easy Optimizer – PageSpeed, Cache & Core Web Vitals (Unused CSS, Delay JS, Lazy Load)

Speed up your WordPress site and improve your Google PageSpeed score from a single dashboard. Easy Optimizer is a free, all-in-one performance plugin that can replace the 3–5 separate speed plugins most sites run today — page caching, unused-CSS removal, JavaScript delay/defer, image lazy loading, LCP preloading, WebP/AVIF delivery and more — to help you pass Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). It runs on Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed, and is fully WooCommerce-aware. One cache plugin, one dashboard, no premium upsells for core features. Prefer to keep your current cache plugin? Turn off the modules that overlap and use only the tools you want (see the FAQ). Every toggle maps to a specific Google Lighthouse recommendation — enable it, save, and your Core Web Vitals improve immediately. Features you don’t enable never touch your page load or your admin. Core Features Full Page Caching: Serve static HTML with sub-millisecond TTFB, with separate mobile and desktop caches and automatic sitemap-based preloading that warms your pages in the background. Compression & Browser Caching: Turn on Gzip or Brotli text compression and long-lived browser-cache (Expires) headers to shrink transfer size and stop repeat visitors re-downloading the same assets — resolving Lighthouse’s “Enable text compression” and “Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy”. Redis Object Cache: Add a persistent object cache that keeps repeated database and option lookups in Redis, cutting MySQL load on dynamic, logged-in and WooCommerce pages. Works with Relay, PhpRedis or the bundled Predis client (no PHP extension required) and reads your host’s WP_REDIS_* constants automatically. It defers to any object-cache drop-in already installed instead of overwriting it, never edits wp-config.php, and includes a one-click flush plus a live status panel (connection, memory, Redis version). Remove Unused CSS: Fix Lighthouse’s “Reduce unused CSS” by serving a slim, per-page-type stylesheet — eliminating render-blocking CSS and lifting your LCP. A built-in fail-safe keeps your original styles until a valid stylesheet is generated, so pages never render unstyled. Minify CSS & JavaScript: Strip comments and whitespace from your local CSS and JS files, caching each minified file on disk so it is processed only once. Already-minified files are skipped, and relative url()/@import paths are rewritten so assets keep resolving. Works independently of Remove Unused CSS and Delay JS. Delay & Defer JavaScript: Cut Total Blocking Time and improve INP by delaying script execution until user interaction, or by deferring scripts natively. jQuery is excluded by default, and you can exclude any script that needs to run early. Smart Lazy Loading: Defer offscreen images, iframes, videos and CSS background images, and add missing width/height attributes to prevent layout shift (CLS). Automatic LCP Preload: Detect each page’s Largest Contentful Paint image and preload it — including responsive srcset, and CSS background heroes — stored per URL so every page preloads its own correct hero for faster visual loading. Image CDN (WebP & AVIF): Rewrite your image URLs to a global CDN that serves modern WebP/AVIF formats and every responsive size, addressing Lighthouse’s “Serve images in next-gen formats”. Optional and off until you enable it. Prefetch Pages: Pre-fetch links as visitors hover — with rate limiting and automatic back-off on a struggling server — making navigation feel like an instant single-page app. Font Optimization: Add font-display: swap so text stays visible during webfont loads, with optional per-device font preloading learned from a lightweight beacon. Bloat Removal: 15 independent toggles to safely switch off unused WordPress core scripts and features (emojis, embeds, XML-RPC, jQuery Migrate, Dashicons, Block Library CSS and more). Database Cleanup & Optimization: Schedule cleanups of revisions, auto-drafts, trashed posts, spam and transients — each with a pre-cleanup snapshot so you can restore safely. The built-in Autoload Health auditor finds the heaviest autoloaded options and lets you switch off the ones you don’t need, directly resolving the Site Health warning “Autoloaded options could affect performance.” Heartbeat & Cron Manager: Limit WordPress Heartbeat frequency and throttle WP-Cron from the dashboard (no wp-config.php edits), and view, run or delete scheduled cron events. Cloudflare Integration: Purge your Cloudflare edge cache (tag-based or full zone) whenever the page cache clears, and test your API connection instantly without saving credentials first. Hosting Integrations: Detect your environment and purge server-level cache on managed hosts including Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround, Cloudways, GridPane, RunCloud, SpinupWP, Rocket.net and WordPress.com. Accessibility & SEO Fixes: Resolve common Lighthouse accessibility warnings in real time — missing form labels, ARIA names, iframe titles and un-crawlable links — without editing your theme. PageSpeed Speed Test: Run a Google PageSpeed test from your dashboard and compare your score with and without Easy Optimizer, for both mobile and desktop, including Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP). Works out of the box, or add your own free Google API key for unlimited tests. Debug Issues Panel: If a page ever looks wrong, switch individual optimizations off for a single page load and find the cause in a couple of clicks — no settings changed, no cache cleared, and no private browsing window needed. It tells you which feature caused it and takes you straight to the exclusion field that makes the fix permanent. Find Slow Plugins & Themes (Backend Analyzer): Profile any page or your admin area on demand to see exactly which plugins, themes and database queries take the most time — so you can pinpoint what is slowing your site down. Nothing runs for real visitors, so there is no added overhead. PageSpeed Insights & Lighthouse Recommendations Addressed Lighthouse 13 renamed and merged many performance audits. Where the name changed, the previous wording is shown in brackets so you can match either against your report. Performance Render blocking requests (was: Eliminate render-blocking resources) Reduce unused CSS Minimize main-thread work Improve image delivery (was: Serve images in next-gen formats / Properly size images) Layout shift culprits (was: Image elements do not have explicit width and height) LCP request discovery (was: Preload Largest Contentful Paint image) Font display (was: Ensure text remains visible during webfont load) Use efficient cache lifetimes (was: Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy) Document request latency (was: Enable text compression / Reduce server response time) Network dependency tree (was: Preconnect to required origins) Accessibility Form elements do not have associated labels Links do not have a discernible name Buttons do not have an accessible name [user-scalable=”no”] in viewport or [maximum-scale] < 5 Frame or iframe elements do not have a title ARIA progressbar elements do not have accessible names Some elements have a [tabindex] value greater than 0 Image elements do not have [alt] attributes SEO Links are not crawlable Image elements do not have [alt] attributes. Works With Your Setup WordPress & PHP: WP 6.4+ and PHP 7.4+ Web Servers: Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed, OpenLiteSpeed WooCommerce: Fully compatible. Cart, checkout, and my-account pages are automatically excluded from caching and optimization to protect the purchase flow. Page Builders: Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Gutenberg, Bricks, Oxygen, Breakdance. A Free Alternative to Premium Speed Plugins Easy Optimizer is a genuine free alternative to paid performance plugins such as WP Rocket, FlyingPress and Perfmatters: page caching, Remove Unused CSS, Delay/Defer JavaScript, LCP preload, lazy load, Cloudflare and hosting-cache purging, database cleanup and the Backend Analyzer are all included, with no premium-locked features and no upsells. Run it as a complete all-in-one, or use just the tools you need alongside your existing setup — the only rule is to never run two of the same optimization (especially two page caches) at once. External Services Each service below is optional and used only for the feature noted. FluxPress Adaptive Images (optional, paid) — with Smart Images connected, your public image URLs are rewritten to your CDN for WebP/AVIF conversion and resizing. Contacts fluxpress.io with your license key and site URL on connect and about hourly. Originals are never uploaded. Terms & Privacy FluxPress PageSpeed proxy — the default speed test; sends your public home URL so no Google API key is needed. Terms & Privacy Google PageSpeed Insights — if you use your own API key, your public home URL is sent to Google. Terms · Privacy Cloudflare API — if connected, purges your edge cache when the page cache clears; sends only the URLs and zone ID. Terms · Privacy FluxPress usage analytics — opt-in, off by default; non-personal data only (versions, theme, host, site URL). Terms & Privacy Privacy Easy Optimizer’s usage analytics are opt-in and disabled by default. When enabled, it sends the data listed under External Services over an encrypted connection. It never collects your email address, IP address, user data, or site content.

A persistent object cache helps your site perform well. This one uses the widely available SQLite3 extension, and optionally the igbinary and APCu extensions to php. Many hosting services offer those extensions, and they are easy to install on a server you control. What is this about? It’s about making your site’s web server perform better. An object cache does that by reducing the workload on your MariaDB or MySQL database. This is not a page cache; these persistent objects go into a different kind of cache. These objects aren’t chunks of web pages ready for people to view in their browsers, they are data objects for use by the WordPress software. Caches are ubiquitous in computing, and WordPress has its own caching subsystem. Caches contain short-term copies of the results of expensive database lookups or computations, and allow software to use the copy rather than repeating the expensive operation. This plugin (like other object-caching plugins) extends WordPress’s caching subsystem to save those short-term copies from page view to page view. WordPress’s cache happens to be a memoization cache. Without a persistent object cache, every WordPress page view must use your MariaDB or MySQL database server to retrieve everything about your site. When a user requests a page, WordPress starts from scratch and loads everything it needs from your database server. Only then can it deliver content to your user. With a persistent object cache, WordPress immediately loads much of the information it needs. This lightens the load on your database server and delivers content to your users faster. Who should use this? If your site runs on a single web server machine, and that server provides the SQLite3 and igbinary extensions to php, this plugin will almost certainly make your site work faster. And if that server provides the APCu extension, this plugin uses it too. Some hosting providers offer redis cache servers. If your provider offers redis, it may be a good choice. You can use it via the Redis Object Cache plugin. Sites using redis have one SQL database and another non-SQL storage server: redis. Other hosting providers offer memcached, which has the Memcached Object Cache plugin. And some large multipurpose cache plugins, such as the LiteSpeed Cache, also offer object caching based on one of those cache server software packages. The cache-server approach to object caching comes into its own when you have multiple load-balanced web server machines handling your site. SQLite doesn’t work correctly in a multiple-web-server environment. But, for single-server site configurations, SQLite, possibly assisted by APCu, performs well. And the vast majority of sites are single-server. APCu APCu is an in-memory storage medium. It lets php programs, like WordPress, store data in shared memory so it’s very fast to retrieve when needed. If APCu is available on your host server, you can configure this plugin to use it. It reduces the typical cache lookup time to one-fifth or less of the SQLite lookup time, which is itself a few tens of microseconds. Performance counts, especially on busy web sites. Please look at Installation to learn how to configure this plugin to use APCu. The plugin works fast without it, and faster with it. WP-CLI: Even if APCu is in use, caching with SQLite is necessary when your web site uses WP-CLI, because WP-CLI programs do not have access to the APCu cache. This plugin writes all cached data both to APCu and to SQLite and makes sure the two are synchronized. WP-CLI You can control this plugin via WP-CLI once you activate it. Please type this command into your shell for details. wp help sqlite-object-cache Credits Thanks to Till Krüss. His Redis Object Cache plugin serves as a model for this one. And thanks to Ari Stathopoulos and Jonny Harris for reviewing this. Props to Matt Jones for finding and fixing a bug that appeared on a heavily loaded system. Thanks to Massimo Villa for testing help, and to nickchomey for a comprehensive code review. All defects are, of course, entirely the author’s responsibility. And thanks to Jetbrains for the use of their software development tools, especially PhpStorm. It’s hard to imagine how a plugin like this one could be developed without PhpStorm’s tools for exploring epic code bases like WordPress’s. How can I learn more about making my WordPress site more efficient? We offer several plugins to help with your site’s database efficiency. You can read about them here.