Hummingbird Performance – Cache & Page Speed Optimization for Core Web Vitals | Critical CSS | Minify CSS | Defer CSS Javascript | CDN vs The Off Switch (formerly WP Avoid Slow)

Hummingbird makes your website faster and optimizes site performance by adding new ways to boost Google PageSpeed Insights with fine-tuned controls over file compression, deferring CSS and JavaScript styles and scripts, minify for CSS and JS, Lazy Load integration, and world-class caching. Hummingbird is brought to you by the WordPress speed specialists that created Smush image optimization, now active on more than +1 million websites. Get the complete speed boost with Hummingbird and Smush. Enjoy top-tier performance and PageSpeed optimization from the start with Hummingbird Pro. Level up immediately with exclusive Pro features like Delay JavaScript Execution, Critical CSS Generation, Brotli file compression, and 119-point global asset CDN with unlimited bandwidth. Learn more about Pro. If PageSpeed Insights is making these speed recommendations Hummingbird can help: Enable text compression – Use gzip to make your site fly (Brotli Compression via CDN included with Pro). Preconnect to required origins – Use Hummingbird to establish earlier connections. Preload key requests – Prioritize resources based on order. Avoid enormous network payloads – Consider Lazy Load for comments or breaking up smaller posts. Use efficient cache – The Hummingbird Cache suite offers effective browser cache for caching any site. Fix your JavaScript execution time – Deliver smaller JS payloads, preload JS, and defer JS. Minify CSS – Strip unused code from your CSS. Minify JavaScript – Speed up the time it takes to parse your JS files. Eliminate render-blocking resources – Move critical CSS and JS inline and defer all non-critical JS/CSS. Delay JavaScript execution (Pro only) – Increase performance by delaying the loading of non-critical JS files and scripts until user interaction. Automatically generate Critical CSS (Pro only) – Substantially boost page speed and UX by prioritizing above-the-fold content. Defer unused CSS – Defer the loading of CSS not used for above-the-fold content. Lazy Load offscreen images (Smush free integration). Hummingbird scans your site and provides one-click fixes to speed up WordPress in a flash. You’ll get faster loading pages, higher search rankings (SERP) and PageSpeed scores, and happier visitors with Hummingbird’s WordPress speed optimization. Optimizing the speed of your site has never been easier! Features Available in Hummingbird Include: Scan and Fix – Get a scan of your site, find out what’s slowing it down, and use one-click performance improvements to make critical speed improvements. World-class caching – A full caching suite to load pages faster with full-page, Gravatar, and browser cache tool. Performance Reports – Pro tips for running your site at super speed. Asset Optimization – Combine, compress and position Javascript, CSS, and Google Font files for top performance. Safe Mode — Test Hummingbird settings without affecting your visitors’ experience, only logged-in admins see the optimized version. Better Rankings – Improve scores on Google PageSpeed Insights (SEO ranking factor), YSlow, Pingdom, and GTmetrix. Increase Your Conversion Rate – Don’t keep visitors waiting: faster sites convert better. GZIP Compression – Blazing-fast HTML, JavaScript, and stylesheet (CSS) transfer. Configs – Set your preferred performance settings, save them as config, and instantly upload to any other site. Font Optimization – Improve site speed, Core Web Vitals, and visual stability by preloading critical fonts and enabling fallbacks. Uptime Monitoring & Alerts – Get instant notifications if your site ever goes down. Scheduled Performance Reports – Stay on top of site speed with regular insights. Learn The Ropes With These Hands-On Hummingbird Tutorials How To Optimize WordPress For Speed With Hummingbird How To Optimize Elementor for Free Using Smush and Hummingbird How To Optimize WPBakery Sites Using Smush And Hummingbird Speed Up and Optimize Avada for Free Using Smush and Hummingbird Optimize Divi for Free Using Smush and Hummingbird Hummingbird Features to Speed Up WordPress Scan and One-Click Fix Hummingbird is a WordPress speed optimization plugin. It will scan your site, find files that are slowing it down, and provide tips and fixes for making your site run at top speed. Hummingbird even has one-click improvements like a full cache suite, one-click minify for styles and scripts, and deferring CSS and JS for quickly optimizing performance. What could be easier! World-Class Caching You’ll get a world-class caching suite, including full-page, browser, and Gravatar cache. Make your site load even faster with Hummingbird’s complete set of cache tools that give your visitors a faster browsing experience. Including full-page, browser and Gravatar caching. Asset Optimization Did you know that loading too many files in your site’s header can slow it down? Hummingbird now gives you granular control with separate Combine and Compress optimization modes, so you can fine tune your Asset Optimization like a pro. Reorder, defer, compress and exclude CSS and JavaScript files with one-click. Transfer Data at Top Speed With GZIP Hummingbird has GZIP powers to make sharing your site more efficient. Sending zipped files is faster and can save you money on hosting. And don’t worry about setup, send Hummingbird instructions with the click of a button and she’ll handle the rest. Built-in Cloudflare Integration Hummingbird can be used to control your Cloudflare browser cache and Automatic Platform Optimizations (APO) settings as well! Simply add your Cloudflare API key and configure away. Font Optimization Boost site speed, Core Web Vitals, and the visual stability of pages for users with Hummingbird’s one-click font optimization features: Preload Fonts, which instructs browsers to preload essential fonts, and Swap Web Fonts, which applies a temporary fallback font until the primary one loads. Fully Compatible With Smush Image Optimization You can complement Hummingbird’s WordPress speed optimization features with our award-winning sister-plugin Smush image optimization. Smush compresses your images, giving your site less to load – and thus a faster load time. Hummingbird + Smush integrate perfectly together, and are the perfect match to speed up WordPress. Compress, optimize (optimise), and fix PageSpeed performance with properly sized images, lazy load, next-gen WebP convert, image formatting, and more. Save time with Hummingbird Configs Configs allow you to save your preferred Hummingbird configuration settings and apply them to your other sites in a few clicks. You can create unlimited configs. Delay Javascript Resources (Pro Only) Boost site performance dramatically by delaying the loading of JS files and third-party scripts until direct user interaction (e.g. scroll or click). Enjoy faster loading pages, improve web vitals, and ace your PageSpeed scores. Activate in one click, includes user interaction timeout and the option to exclude critical files from being delayed. A paid WPMU DEV account (the developers of Hummingbird) is required to access this feature. You can check out our affordable plans here. Generate Critical CSS (Pro Only) Maximize site speed and user experience by prioritizing only the CSS that matters most. The Generate Critical CSS feature intelligently generates and embeds critical CSS in the head of each page, giving priority to above-the-fold content and significantly improving loading speed. Updates to your critical CSS are automated with every site design change, and you can enable/disable with a click. Faster Websites Rank Higher, Convert Better Every millisecond counts: your visitors expect an ever-faster website, with a page load time of under two seconds expected – and the norm. If visitors don’t get that on your site, they will leave. If you’re running a business website or eCommerce store, that means if your website does not load quickly, you will lose sales. Hummingbird is here to help you; it’s a one of a kind WordPress performance optimization plugin that can make your site run at superspeed, for free! You get our WordPress performance optimization suite, which includes minification and GZIP for small page sizes, full caching for faster loading, and integration with Cloudflare’s APO / browser cache, and our sister-plugin Smush image optimization. Hummingbird is built with ease-of-use in mind; it makes your WordPress site faster, but it’s also fast to set up. You can scan your site and implement recommended changes in one-click, getting a fast site in mere minutes. All the above is free and will speed up WordPress for you. If you need the very fastest WordPress site, you should get a WPMU DEV Membership. Our Membership gives you access to Hummingbird Pro – which features automated scanning, enhanced minify compression (with 2x the regular optimization), CDN hosted minification – alongside Smush Pro image optimization, all our premium WordPress plugins, and 24/7 WordPress support. It’s an incredible deal, and you can find out more here. What do People say About Hummingbird? ★★★★★ “Hummingbird is so easy to use. I thought it wouldn’t change my speed much because I already made improvements. I ran the scan, it gave me recommendations, I pushed a button to apply them and it made my site even faster!” – Camilo ★★★★★ “Hummingbird is getting smarter with each update. Today it’s become so good that it forced me to remove giant cache and optimization plugins like WP Super Cache and WP Sweep because now Hummingbird includes all those features – but in a more impressive way.” – swagatam1975 ★★★★★ “Hummingbird took me from 32 to 84 on Google page speed plus made my site 50% faster on GTmetrix!” – Nicolas ★★★★★ “I just built a real bloated sack of crap of a WP site, and after configuring Hummingbird and letting it do its thing, the site is actually fast — much faster than it has any right to be…I’m impressed.” – Cacarr A Note From Hummingbird Hey! This is Hummingbird, your trusted solution to speed up WordPress. I’m part of the WPMU DEV team, a superhero-suite of WordPress plugins, services, and support. Here are some of our other free plugins: Smush – Image Compression and Optimization Forminator – Form, Quiz, Poll and Survey Builder Hustle – Pop-ups, Slide-ins and Email Opt-ins And if you need ALL our Pro plugins AND 24/7 WordPress support, get WPMU DEV membership! My superhero friends run the WPMU DEV Blog, your source for the very best WordPress tutorials. If you need to be in the know about WordPress, check it out. Thanks for looking at Hummingbird, and I look forward to flying through your site to make it faster than ever. Enjoy, The Hummingbird About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Join us here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you!

WordPress prioritises backwards compatibility. That’s a feature. It also means every install ships with things you didn’t ask for. An emoji CDN script. An oEmbed script. A Windows Live Writer manifest (discontinued 2017). Dashicons loaded for logged-out visitors. Heartbeat polling every 15 seconds. A version tag that tells the world exactly which WordPress you’re running. None of these are bugs. They’re just not needed on most sites. Disable what you don’t need. Keep what you do. The Off Switch lets you disable each one, individually. One screen, every switch A live counter shows how many switches are on. A sticky bar keeps Save, the filter, and state chips (All / On / Off / Changed / New) in reach while you scroll. Changed switches are highlighted until you save, and an “unsaved changes” pill shows exactly what you’ve flipped before you commit. Jump between sections with live per-section counts, or copy a WP-CLI command that replicates your whole configuration on another site. Every switch card states what it removes, what it saves, and what to watch out for. All 104 switches were functionally verified against a live WordPress 7.0 install for this release. Bloat Remover Emoji script – ~15 KB + 1 HTTP request. Browsers handle emoji natively. Embed script – ~4 KB + oEmbed discovery links in . RSD link – Really Simple Discovery. Only needed for legacy XML-RPC clients. WLW manifest – Windows Live Writer has been discontinued since 2017. WordPress 6.3 removed this link from core — the switch matters on WordPress 6.2 and older. WP version tag – Stops advertising your WordPress version to the world. Shortlink – Removes from and HTTP headers. Search engines ignore it. Asset query strings – Strips ?ver= from scripts, styles, and WP 6.5+ Script Modules so CDNs and proxies cache correctly. XML-RPC – Closes a common brute-force attack vector. XML-RPC Kill Requests – Goes further than disabling: hard-kills any incoming xmlrpc.php request with a 403 before WordPress loads at all. Heartbeat API – Reduces admin polling from every 15 s to every 60 s. Dashicons (frontend) – ~35 KB (CSS + font) saved for every logged-out visitor. REST API Discovery Link – Removes from . Safe to remove on standard sites. RSS Feed Links – Removes feed autodiscovery tags from . Modern browsers no longer act on them. Leave enabled if you publish an RSS feed. Speculation Rules (WP 6.8+) – Disables the WP 6.8+ Speculation Rules API that prefetches links before users click. Can inflate analytics, increase server bandwidth, and trigger consent flows on unfetched pages. Disable All Feeds – Redirects all RSS and Atom feed URLs to the homepage. For sites with no RSS subscribers. Comment Auto-Links – Stops WordPress from converting plain-text URLs in comments into clickable links. Editor Autosave – Deregisters the autosave script that POSTs editor content to the server every 60 seconds. For teams that prefer explicit saves. DNS Prefetch – Removes all hints from . Redundant when Emojis and Embeds are already disabled. Recent Comments Inline CSS – WordPress outputs a small inline block in whenever the Recent Comments widget is active. Remove it if your theme already styles the widget. Script & Style Control jQuery Migrate – ~30 KB. Modern themes don’t need it. Block Library CSS – ~7 KB loaded on every page, even with no Gutenberg blocks. Global Styles (theme.json CSS) – 10-50 KB inline CSS from block themes. SVG Duotone Filters – Hidden SVG blob injected on every page, even with no duotone images. WordPress 6.3 made duotone output on-demand — the switch matters on WordPress 6.2 and older. Script/Style type attributes – type="text/javascript" and type="text/css" are redundant in HTML5. Defer non-critical JavaScript – Adds defer so scripts don’t block HTML parsing. jQuery is never deferred. Move scripts to footer – Relocates enqueued scripts from to just before . jQuery is never moved. Template Output Buffering (WP 7.0) – Since WordPress 7.0, classic themes get every frontend page buffered in memory in full and re-parsed before a single byte reaches the visitor, so late-printed block styles can be hoisted into . Turning the buffer off restores streamed output for faster TTFB and lower peak memory. Block themes are unaffected. WordPress Behaviour Tweaks Self-pingbacks – WordPress pings your own posts when you link between them – a wasted HTTP request that creates an unwanted comment on the target post. Capital P filter – WordPress corrects “WordPress” to “WordPress” on every rendered string. Remove if you don’t need the autocorrect. Limit post revisions – WordPress stores unlimited revisions per post. Caps revisions at 3 to prevent silent database growth on active editorial sites. Attachment pages – WordPress creates a full template page for every uploaded file. These waste crawl budget on most sites. Sends a 301 redirect to the parent post instead. Comments – Closes all comments and pingbacks site-wide, hides existing comments on the frontend, and removes comment-related UI from wp-admin (Comments menu, admin bar node, dashboard widget). Enable only if your site does not use comments. Search – Redirects all WordPress search queries (/?s=) to the homepage with a 301, preventing bots from triggering repeated database queries. Also removes search forms rendered via get_search_form(). Hardcoded forms in theme templates are not affected. oEmbed Provider – WordPress registers a REST endpoint at /wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed so other sites can embed your content via the oEmbed protocol. Remove it if you don’t want your content embeddable externally. Does not affect your ability to embed others’ content. Post via Email – Removes the Post via Email configuration from Writing Settings and disables the feature. Almost no modern site uses email-to-post. Update Services (Ping-o-Matic) – Removes Update Services from Writing Settings and stops outbound pings to weblog ping services on every published post. Native XML Sitemap (WP 5.5+) – Disables WordPress’s built-in XML sitemap generator. Most sites use external SEO plugins (Yoast, Rank Math) for sitemaps instead. Removes unnecessary redirects and reduces crawl overhead (default OFF). oEmbed Auto-Embed – Disables WordPress from regex-scanning post content for [embed] shortcodes and oEmbed patterns on every frontend page load. For sites that do not embed external content, removing this filter saves processing overhead (default OFF). Database & Query Expired Transients – Schedules a daily cleanup of expired transient rows in wp_options. Useful on low-traffic sites where WP-Cron can go days without firing. Abandoned Auto-Drafts – WordPress creates an auto-draft every time the post editor opens. Abandoned sessions leave these rows permanently. Runs a daily sweep to delete auto-drafts older than 30 days. Skip Row Count on Singles – On every single post or page, MySQL runs SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS to count total matching rows – a full index scan only needed for paginated archives. Removes that sub-query on all singular views. Adjacent Post Links – Older WordPress queries the previous and next post on every single post page to output in — two extra DB queries per page load. Google dropped support for these hints in 2019, and modern WordPress no longer outputs them; the switch matters on older installs. Reduce Trash Retention – WordPress keeps trashed items for 30 days before permanent deletion. A daily sweep permanently deletes posts and comments trashed more than 7 days ago, keeping wp_posts leaner on active editorial sites without affecting normal recovery workflows. Image Performance Google Fonts display:swap – Without font-display:swap, the browser hides text while your Google Font downloads (FOIT). Adds display=swap to every Google Fonts URL so visitors see text immediately. Add missing image dimensions – Images without width and height attributes cause layout shifts (CLS). Reads dimensions from attachment metadata and injects them automatically. LCP image priority – Adds fetchpriority="high" to the first content image so the browser loads it before lower-priority resources. Adds fetchpriority="low" and decoding="async" to all others. Lazy load images – Adds loading="lazy" to images below the fold. The first image is never lazy-loaded – it is the LCP candidate and must load immediately. Disable PDF thumbnails – WordPress generates thumbnail previews for every uploaded PDF when ImageMagick is available. Rarely used on the frontend; adds significant upload processing time. Disable scaled images – WordPress 5.3+ creates a downsized -scaled copy of any image whose longest side exceeds 2560 px on upload. On most sites this extra file is never served. Disabling it stores the original as-uploaded. Applies to new uploads only. Disable extra image sizes – WordPress 5.3 added 1536×1536 and 2048×2048 intermediate sizes to every image upload. These oversized copies are rarely requested and waste disk space. Theme and plugin image sizes are not affected. Applies to new uploads only. Security & Admin Hardening Block User Enumeration – WordPress redirects ?author=1 to /author/username/, exposing registered usernames. Intercepts those requests and redirects to the homepage before the username is revealed. Disable Author Archives – Redirects all /author/username/ pages to the homepage. For sites with no author profile pages. Disable File Editor – Defines DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT to remove the plugin and theme code editor from wp-admin. Eliminates a code-injection surface a compromised admin account could exploit. Disable Application Passwords – Removes the Application Passwords UI and stops all tokens from being accepted. For sites that don’t use REST API or XML-RPC integrations. Suppress Admin Email Check – Disables the periodic full-screen prompt asking admins to confirm their email address. One less interruption, no functional change. Remove X-Pingback Header – Strips X-Pingback: from every HTTP response, stopping the site from advertising its XML-RPC endpoint URL to scanners. Clean Admin Bar – Removes the WordPress logo dropdown, the duplicate “Visit Site” link, and the admin bar search for a less cluttered editing environment. Hide Update Nag for Non-Admins – Hides the core update notice from editors and contributors who cannot action it. Administrators still see it normally. Restrict REST API to Logged-In Users – The REST API is publicly accessible by default, allowing unauthenticated enumeration of posts, users, and other data. Restricting access to authenticated users reduces the attack surface. Will break public REST consumers such as headless frontends. Redirect Unauthenticated Admin Access – By default, visiting /wp-admin/ without being logged in redirects to the login page, confirming a WordPress admin area exists. This redirects unauthenticated requests to the homepage instead, reducing information disclosure to scanners. AJAX, Cron, WP-CLI, and admin-post.php requests are never affected. Hide Author Sitemap – WordPress 5.5 added a built-in XML sitemap that includes a users file listing the author archive URL for every user with published posts — up to 2,000 usernames, publicly accessible. Removes the users entry from the sitemap index entirely (WP 5.5+, default ON). Remove X-Redirect-By Header – WordPress 5.1+ adds an X-Redirect-By: WordPress header on every redirect, openly advertising that the site runs WordPress. Removes it from all redirects (default ON). Hide PHP Version Header – PHP sends an X-Powered-By: PHP/x.x.x header on every response, exposing your exact PHP version to every visitor and scanner. Removes it from all responses (default ON). Generic PHP Error Messages – WordPress fatal error messages can include internal file paths and line numbers. Replaces them with a generic response that reveals nothing about server structure (default ON). Hide Admin Bar on Frontend – Removes the WordPress admin toolbar from the public-facing site for all logged-in users. Reduces frontend CSS/JS overhead for logged-in sessions (default OFF). Remove Dashboard Welcome Panel – Removes the “Welcome to WordPress” panel from the dashboard home screen for all users (default OFF). Remove Default Dashboard Widgets – Removes four default dashboard widgets including WordPress Events and News, which makes an outbound HTTP request to api.wordpress.org on every dashboard load (default OFF). Remove Admin Footer Text – Removes the “Thank you for creating with WordPress” text and WordPress version number from the wp-admin footer (default OFF). Disable REST Users Endpoint – WordPress’s REST API exposes /wp-json/wp/v2/users publicly, returning usernames and slugs for all users with published posts. Removes this endpoint for unauthenticated requests only — Gutenberg and plugins that need it while logged in are unaffected (default ON). Disable Email Change Notifications – WordPress sends emails to users when their email address or password changes. On agency-managed sites these are noise. Suppresses both notification types (default OFF). Disable Auto-Update Emails – WordPress emails after every automatic core, plugin (WP 5.5+), and theme (WP 5.5+) update. On sites where auto-updates are routine these arrive constantly (default OFF). Auto-Update Emails: Errors Only – A middle ground: suppresses core auto-update success emails only. Failure emails still arrive so you know when action is needed (default OFF). Skip Bundled Themes on Upgrade – Defines CORE_UPGRADE_SKIP_NEW_BUNDLED to stop WordPress installing a new default theme on every core upgrade. Existing themes are not affected (default OFF). Disable Site Health – Disables WordPress Site Health checks entirely. Site Health runs a 12-hour background cron job and makes REST API calls on every admin page load, fetching a list of ~20 WordPress.org API endpoints. On managed hosting with automated updates, these checks are redundant and add unnecessary server load (default OFF). WordPress 7.0 Off switches for the new subsystems WordPress 7.0 turns on by default. AI Support – WordPress 7.0 ships a built-in AI client framework that initialises on every request. Filters wp_supports_ai to false so the AI subsystem never bootstraps — no providers, no AI REST surface, no AI options on the Connectors page. Connectors Registry – WordPress 7.0 initialises a connector registry on every request, frontend included, registering the bundled Akismet connector and any AI providers. Skips registry initialisation entirely on sites that use no connectors. Core AI Abilities – Stops WordPress from registering its built-in AI abilities (site info, user info, and more) when the Abilities API registry is first used. Completes the AI off switch. Abilities REST API – Removes the wp-abilities/v1 REST namespace (list, categories, and run endpoints) that exposes server-side abilities to REST clients. Icons REST Endpoint – Removes the /wp/v2/icons endpoints that serve SVG icon data to the block editor icon picker. AI Connectors Page – Removes the Connectors submenu from Settings, hiding the AI provider configuration page. Admin View Transitions – Removes the CSS View Transitions stylesheet WordPress 7.0 enqueues on every wp-admin screen, restoring instant admin navigation. Command Palette – Removes the ⌘K / Ctrl+K command palette: the admin bar trigger button and the JS bundle enqueued on every wp-admin page. Block Editor Remote Block Patterns – WordPress fetches patterns from api.wordpress.org on every editor load. …