SpinupWP vs PlugoSpeed

PlugoSpeed is a WordPress performance plugin that combines page caching, asset optimization, and Core Web Vitals improvements in a single lightweight package. It generates static HTML cache files served directly from disk via Apache — bypassing PHP and WordPress on cached requests. In testing on a standard VPS, this approach achieves sub-50ms TTFB and PageSpeed scores of 95/100 on desktop. A React 18 dashboard provides real-time cache hit rates, bandwidth saved, and PageSpeed score tracking — no jQuery required. Core Features (Free) Static HTML Cache Pages are stored as static .html files on disk. Apache serves them directly — no PHP, no database, no WordPress bootstrap. Cache TTL is configurable (default: 24 hours). HTML Minification Removes unnecessary whitespace and comments from the final HTML output, reducing page size without affecting content or functionality. CSS Minification Minifies stylesheet files inline, reducing transfer size. Combine is intentionally disabled by default for HTTP/2 compatibility. JavaScript Defer Adds defer to non-critical scripts, improving Time to Interactive (TTI) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) scores on mobile. Image Lazy Loading Adds native loading="lazy" to images and iframes below the fold. Injects explicit width and height attributes to reduce Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Database Cleanup Scheduled cleanup of post revisions, auto-drafts, spam comments, and expired transients. Configurable schedule: daily, weekly, or monthly. Cache Preloading After purge, PlugoSpeed re-warms the cache automatically by walking your XML sitemap. Rate-limited to avoid server overload. Auto Cache Purge Cache is invalidated on post save, theme change, plugin activation, and WooCommerce stock/price updates. PageSpeed Dashboard Tracks your Google PageSpeed Insights score over time with a 30-day graph. Shows live cache hit/miss ratio, bandwidth saved, and page count. Pro Features Remove Unused CSS (RUCSS) Generates a per-page stylesheet containing only the CSS rules that are actually used. Eliminates render-blocking CSS from page builders and plugin stylesheets. Requires a PlugoPress API key. Critical CSS Inlines the above-the-fold CSS directly in , eliminating render-blocking for a faster LCP. Requires a PlugoPress API key. WebP Image Serving Automatically serves .webp versions of images to supported browsers, reducing image payload by 25–35% without quality loss. Upgrade to Pro → plugopress.com/plugospeed/ Compatibility PlugoSpeed is tested and verified compatible with: Page Builders: Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks, Oxygen, WPBakery Themes: Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence, Hello Elementor, OceanWP, Blocksy, Neve, Flatsome E-Commerce: WooCommerce (cart exclusion, stock purge, vary by currency) Multilingual: WPML, Polylang (vary cache by language) SEO: Rank Math, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO CDN: Cloudflare (Pro: API purge integration) Technical Highlights Apache .htaccess rules serve cached HTML at low TTFB — before PHP loads advanced-cache.php drop-in captures misses and writes cache files Optimizer pipeline: Image → JS → CSS → HTML (order matters for correctness) WooCommerce cart/checkout pages are automatically excluded from cache Logged-in users never receive cached pages (preserves nonces and personalisation) Action Scheduler handles background jobs (preload, cleanup, RUCSS generation) REST API powers the dashboard — all actions are nonce-protected with manage_options capability checks Links Plugin Page Documentation Changelog Support External Services This plugin connects to the following external services: Google PageSpeed Insights API Purpose: Measures your site’s performance score and Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID) When it is called: Only when viewing the PlugoSpeed dashboard or when a manual refresh is triggered by the site administrator Data transmitted: Your site’s public URL — no personal data is sent Terms of Service: https://developers.google.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy PlugoPress Cloud API (api.plugopress.com) Purpose: Powers Pro features: Remove Unused CSS (RUCSS) and Critical CSS generation When it is called: Only when a valid API key is configured by the site administrator AND the corresponding Pro feature is enabled Data transmitted: The page URL and rendered HTML of the requested page, used solely for CSS analysis Terms of Service: https://plugopress.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://plugopress.com/privacy-policy PlugoPress Badge Service (plugopress.com) Purpose: Displays a performance badge in the PlugoSpeed dashboard When it is called: When the dashboard is viewed and a PageSpeed score is available Data transmitted: Only the numeric PageSpeed score is included in the image URL — no personal data is sent Terms of Service: https://plugopress.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://plugopress.com/privacy-policy

This plugin ensures that the SpinupWP page cache is cleared when your site’s content changes. Not using SpinupWP yet? Sign up here. SpinupWP is a modern server control panel that’s here to help you implement best practices for every server you spin up. Designed for WordPress. This companion plugin should be installed on sites created using SpinupWP to allow the page cache to be cleared when your site’s content changes. Not using SpinupWP yet? Sign up here. Any Provider We support DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, and any other provider. If your server has an IP address, you can connect SpinupWP. It does need to be a fresh install of Ubuntu though. Latest & Greatest Software SpinupWP will install the latest stable versions of Nginx, PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, and Redis from the standard apt-get repos. No who-knows-what-they-did custom builds of packages. Disconnect from SpinupWP in the future and you can still keep your packages up-to-date with apt-get upgrade. Automatic Security Updates SpinupWP will configure your server to install security updates as soon as they are available to reduce the likelihood of a software vulnerability putting your server at risk. Free SSL/TLS Certificates Serving your site over HTTPS is essential these days, not only for security, but to take advantage of the performance improvements of HTTP/2 as well. When you add a site to SpinupWP, a free Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate will be acquired, installed, and configured for your site. And SpinupWP will handle certificate renewals as well, so you hardly need to think about certificates. Cache All the Things One of the keys to a great performing WordPress site is caching. All sites are set up with Redis object caching to greatly reduce database requests. And with the check of a box you can enable full-page caching to serve pages lightning fast without even hitting PHP. Git Push-to-Deploy Developers! Developers! Developers! Add a git repository to your SpinupWP site and simply push to master to deploy your code. GitHub, Bitbucket, or a custom git repo will work. You can also configure a build script to run some tasks on the server after deployment is complete. Error Logs WordPress doesn’t enable error logging by default. Probably because the log is saved to a publicly accessible directory and can quickly balloon to take up a lot of hard drive space. SpinupWP enables error logs by default but stores them in a safe place and makes sure they’re rotated regularly like other server logs. Security Security Security Each server provisioned by SpinupWP is security-hardened from the word go. SSH login is disabled for the root user (you login with your user and use sudo instead). The firewall only allows connections to Nginx and SSH and failed attempts are monitored and blocked when the reach a threshold. Nginx is configured to defend against XSS, clickjacking, MIME sniffing, and other attacks. Software security updates are installed automatically. Scheduled Posts Published on Schedule For every site you add via SpinupWP, a server-side cron job will be configured to make sure that your WordPress site’s cron is executed every minute, as it should be. WP-CLI Preloaded If you love WP-CLI (we do! ❤) you’ll be very pleased to find it available on the command line the first time you login to your server. Security Isolation for Sites For each site that you add to your server via SpinupWP, a new system user is created for that site. All site files are owned by the site user and a PHP-FPM pool is configured to run as that user as well. Each site only has access to its files and so if only one site has a security vulnerability and gets infected with malware for example, only the files for that one site can be infected. SFTP Access for Your Clients If you’re hosting a site for someone else, you can easily give them SFTP/SSH access to just that site. And because of the security isolation between sites, they will only have access to files for that site. Professional Guidance & Best Practices SpinupWP will actively point you in the right direction and offer suggestions for maintaining your server. And because it provides detailed feedback about the operations it runs on your server, you can learn what is happening with your server. New release of Ubuntu just came out, should I upgrade? We’ll add a notice to the app about that, why we don’t recommend upgrading your existing servers, and how you can spin up a new server with the new release of Ubuntu and migrate your sites to that server instead. Should I install Varnish to improve page caching performance? We’ve benchmarked Varnish and Nginx FastCGI Cache performed better. Varnish would add complexity too, so one less moving part is another reason. Much of the time SpinupWP will suggest things that you may not have even thought of. Email deliverability for example. SpinupWP will strongly encourage you to configure an email sending plugin for the best email deliverability. SpinupWP’s guidance is especially helpful for those new to managing a server, but can also help those who’ve been at it a while, providing transparency to our decisions. Scheduled Backups of Site Files & Database All server providers (DigitalOcean, Linode, etc) offer automated backups of your entire server for a fee. These services are great and we highly recommend having backups of your whole server. But what happens if some media or data was deleted by accident from your WordPress site? You’re not going to restore your entire server just to get that data back. That’s where site backups come in. Site backups are full backups of your site files (media, themes, and plugins) and database. They allow you to easily restore a single site or just some files or data from a single site. With SpinupWP’s site backups, you choose your preferred provider to stash your backups whether that’s Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Google Cloud Storage. You plug in your account details and SpinupWP will send your site backups there in an easy-to-see format. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work Create a new team account, invite a member of your team, and allow them to spin up their own servers. Or just only allow them to add sites, the permissions you give them is up to you. Features Page cache purging Persistent object caching Ensures debug.log files aren’t saved in a publicly-accessible location