Jetpack Boost – Website Speed, Performance and Critical CSS vs SQLite Object Cache

Speed up your WordPress site by optimizing page performance with Jetpack Boost. Easily activate one-click optimizations to boost your Core Web Vitals. Did you know that a faster website:- Ranks higher on Google. Improves bounce rate (people stay on your site for longer). Increases your conversion rate. Increase your website performance and speed up your website with one-click optimizations that supercharge your WordPress site’s performance and improve core web vitals scores for better search engine listings. Improving Core Web Vitals helps you rank higher on Google. A faster website also improves your SEO, helps you reduce your bounce rate and increase your ecommerce conversion rate. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. Improve your LCP and improve your website loading speed. First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To improve user experience pages should have a low FID. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Lowering your CLS helps improve your user experience. Performance Modules Optimize your website with the same techniques used on the world’s most successful websites. Each technique that is used to increase website performance is packaged up as a module that you can activate and try out. Currently, the plugin has 6 performance modules available: Optimize CSS Loading generates Critical CSS for your homepage, posts and pages. This can allow your content to show up on the screen much faster, particularly for viewers using mobile devices. Read more about critical CSS generation at web.dev Page Cache speeds up your site by saving pages as static files. These files are quickly served to visitors, reducing load times and enhancing user experience. Defer Non-Essential JavaScript moves some tasks to after the page loads, so that important visual information can be seen sooner and your website loads quicker. Read more about deferring JavaScript at web.dev Image Guide is a must-have feature for anyone who wants to optimize the images on their website. With this guide, you can ensure that the images on your site are the right size and dimensions, which is critical for improving user experience, page speed, and site ranking. Following the tips and best practices outlined in the guide, you can reduce image file sizes and speed up your site. Check out our support page to learn more about this feature and how it can help you achieve a faster and smoother website experience for your users. Image CDN allows your site to serve automatically-resized images in modern web formats directly from Jetpack’s worldwide Content Delivery Network. Read more about Image CDNs at web.dev Concatenate and Minify CSS and JS combines and shrinks your JavaScript and CSS resources to reduce the number and size of requests to your server, ensuring your content loads faster. Read more about minifying files at web.dev Don’t want to have to manually generate your critical CSS each time you update your site? Let us do the heavy lifting for you with automated critical CSS – each time you update your site we will automatically regenerate your critical CSS and update your performance scores. Upgrading also gives you dedicated email support access. With 💚 by Jetpack This is just the start! We are working hard to bring more features and improvements to Jetpack Boost. Let us know your thoughts and ideas! We’d also like to give a special THANK YOU to the XWP team who provided help with initial research and scoping of the plugin and were engaged with our team throughout the project.

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.