JCH Optimize vs SQLite Object Cache

JCH Optimize improves the performance of your website by performing several optimizations to the HTML page aimed at improving the Web Vitals measured by PageSpeed Insights, such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Speed Index (SI), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Time to Interactive (TTI), and Total Blocking Time (TBT). These metrics attempt to quantify the quality of the user experience. JCH Optimize can improve these metrics to provide a better experience for your users and improve your PageSpeed scores. Optimizations Performed By JCH Optimize JCH Optimize optimizes your pages by automatically performing some recommended strategies offered by PageSpeed, which include: Minify CSS and JavaScript files and the HTML. Unnecessary whitespaces and other characters are removed to reduce network payload sizes and script parse times. Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources. Inline critical JavaScript and CSS and defer all non-critical resources to prevent resources from blocking the first paint of your page. Defer offscreen images. Offscreen and hidden images are lazy-loaded after all critical resources have finished loading to lower Time To Interactive (TTI). Add Width and Height attributes to images. Set an explicit width and height on image elements to reduce layout shifts and improve CLS. Enable text compression. Boilerplate codes are placed in the .htaccess files at the site’s directory root to instruct the server to serve text-based resources with compression (deflate or brotli) to minimize total network bytes. Preload critical resources. Automatically analyzes each page to identify critical resources to load with a high priority by HTTP/2 enabled servers to improve LCP time. Reduce initial server response. A page cache feature is included in the plugin that integrates well with the other optimization features and significantly reduces time-to-first-byte. Benefits of Using JCH Optimize Research has confirmed that 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to download. Also, Google and other search engines have indicated that their ranking algorithm increasingly factors website download speed. The benefits of using JCH Optimize then include: Improved user experience. Your users will have a pleasant experience as they browse your site. Improved SEO. Your rankings in Google search pages can increase and improve organic visibility in internet searches. Improved conversions. Your website revenue also increases with increased traffic volume and visitor retention. Pro Version available There is a pro version available with more optimization features and options and premium support with assistance to configure plugin to resolve conflicts and improve performance on our website. How to use To use, first temporarily deactivate all page caching features and plugins, then use the ‘Automatic Settings’ (Minimum – Optimum) to configure the plugin. The ‘Automatic Settings’ are concerned with the combining of the CSS and javascript files, and the management of the combined files, and automatically sets the options in the ‘Automatic Settings Groups’. Use the Exclude options to exclude files or plugins that don’t work so well when combined with JCH Optimize. You can then try the other optimization features in turn such as Sprite Generator, Add Image Attributes, Lazy Load Images, CDN/Cookieless Domain, Optimize CSS Delivery, etc., based on the optimization needs of your site. Flush all your cache before re-enabling caching features and plugins. Documentation Visit our documentation on the main plugin site for more information on how the plugin works and how to configure it to improve your scores on GtMetrix and PageSpeed Insights Advanced Features and Premium Support If you need assistance on your website in configuring the plugin to resolve any conflicts or if you need access to more advanced features such as Http/2 support, Remove unused CSS, Lazy-load iframes, Optimize Images, using multiple domains with CDN, then there’s a Pro version available on a subscription basis. With an active subscription you get premium technical support through our ticket system, access to downloads of new versions, and access to our Optimize Image API.

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.