Speed Optimizer – The All-In-One Performance-Boosting Plugin vs WP Super Cache

The award-winning Speed Optimizer plugin is a free WordPress performance-boosting solution to improve user experience, increase conversion rates and drive more traffic. Achieve better SEO rankings, improve Core Web Vitals and enhance your Google Page Speed Score. Developed by the WordPress speed experts at SiteGround, our free plugin is actively used and trusted by more than 2 million website owners. It’s specially designed to be easy to use, allowing users of all skill levels to make complex speed optimizations, such as minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript, image compression and lazy loading, in a few clicks. Install our caching plugin now to dramatically improve your WordPress website performance on any hosting platform. Essential Speed-boosting Features: Powerful Caching for up to 20% faster website. Frontend Optimizations to minify JS, HTML and CSS, reducing wait time due to the number of scripts and characters in your code Media Optimizations by up to 85% image size compression without sacrificing quality WordPress Environment Optimizations to optimize usage and efficiency of your WordPress site resources Speed Test & tips to get on-demand optimization tips to help your site get even faster Don’t let a slow website compromise your online success. Join the millions of satisfied website owners and see the difference with the free Speed Optimizer plugin. AWARDS: Monster Awards 2022: Best WordPress Optimization Plugin 🥈 Plugin Video Plugin Tutorial To gain in-depth knowledge about our plugin and its functionalities, check our Speed Optimizer Tutorial. It provides detailed information on how to optimize each aspect of your site and maximizes your website performance and cache. CACHING The Caching page gives you full control of your website’s cache, allowing you to enhance its performance significantly. Take advantage of the powerful caching options available to boost your page speed: DYNAMIC CACHING: By enabling Dynamic Caching, all non-static resources of your website are intelligently cached, eliminating the need for repetitive database queries and enhancing page loading speed and TTFB (time to first byte). This default feature is available exclusively for SiteGround servers, ensuring optimal performance. FILE-BASED CACHING: By activating file-based caching, your website generates and stores static HTML versions, ensuring faster loading times and an improved user experience. This efficient caching method stores the cached files conveniently in the browser’s memory, allowing future visitors to access your site swiftly and seamlessly. MEMCACHED: Unleash the power of object caching for your WordPress website. Memcached revolutionizes website performance by storing frequently executed queries to your databases and reusing them for lightning-fast website results. This powerful feature is exclusively available in the SiteGround environment. CACHING SETTINGS: Automatic Cache Purge: ensure the cache is cleared whenever necessary Manual Cache Purge: purge cache manually if you are editing new material and do not have automatic purge activated. Browser-specific Caching: generate caching separately for different browsers Exclude Post Types from Caching: exclude specific post types from being cached Exclude URLs from Caching: exclude specific URLs or utilize wildcards to exclude any sub-pages of a designated “parent-page.” Test URL Caching Status: verify if dynamic caching is actively running on specific URLs ENVIRONMENT OPTIMIZATIONS Optimize and fine-tune your site’s environment for optimal website performance: HTTPS Enforce: Ensure a secure browsing experience for your visitors by effortlessly enabling HTTPS for your site. Say goodbye to insecure content errors and build trust with your audience. Scheduled Database Maintenance: Take control of your database by activating the Database Optimization feature. This functionality removes unnecessary items and optimizes your database tables, leading to improved efficiency and website performance. If you’re using the InnoDB storage engine, table optimisation is automatically handled by the engine itself. Heartbeat Control: Manage the frequency of the WP Heartbeat for different areas of your website. By default, the WordPress Heartbeat API checks for scheduled tasks every 15 seconds on post edit pages and every 60 seconds on the dashboard and front end. With Heartbeat Control, you can adjust the frequency of these checks or even disable them entirely, providing you with greater control over resource allocation. FRONTEND OPTIMIZATIONS Enhance and fine-tune the performance of your website’s front end by minifying JS, HTML and CSS: CSS Tab: Minify CSS files, activate or deactivate CSS combinations to reduce server requests, and even preload combined CSS for optimized performance. Additionally, you can exclude specific styles from being combined or minified, giving you complete control over your CSS optimization. JavaScript Tab: Activate or deactivate Minify JavaScript Files to reduce script sizes and lower the number of server requests. You can also defer render-blocking JavaScript to expedite the initial page speed. Furthermore, you have the ability to exclude specific scripts from various optimisation processes, providing flexibility in optimizing your JavaScript resources. General Tab: Further optimization options include: Web Fonts Optimization: Enhance the loading of Google fonts by adding a preconnect link in your head tag. This informs the browser to establish a connection to Google’s font repository as quickly as possible. Additionally, all other local fonts will be preloaded, resulting in faster caching and rendering. When combined with CSS Combination, we also modify the font-display property to improve rendering speed. Fonts Preloading: With locally hosted fonts being preloaded, you’re allowing browsers to cache and render them at an accelerated pace. Remove Query Strings from Static Resources: Improve caching efficiency by removing query strings from static resources, optimizing their caching capabilities. Disable Emojis: Prevent WordPress from detecting and generating emojis on your pages by disabling emojis support. This helps boost your page speed and improve your website performance. DNS Pre-fetch for External Domains: Enabling the DNS Pre-fetch for a domain will resolve it before resources from it get requested making those resources load faster. MEDIA OPTIMIZATIONS Optimize your website media by reducing image size by up to 85% times while maintaining top-notch quality. Image Compression: Effortlessly compress images to resize your existing images and reduce the space they occupy on your server. The dimensions of the images will remain unchanged, allowing for optimized storage. Fine-tune the compression level and choose whether to create backups of the original images. Please note that image compression feature is exclusive to the SiteGround Environment. WebP Images: Leverage the power of WebP, a cutting-edge image format supported by modern browsers, to significantly reduce the size of your images and skyrocket your page speed. If a browser doesn’t support WebP, the original images will be loaded. Lazy Load Media: Take control of your website’s asset loading with the ability to enable or disable Lazy Load for various assets. You can exclude specific assets such as iframes, videos, thumbnails, widgets, and shortcodes from the dropdown menu. Additionally, you have the option to exclude specific images from the Lazy Load by adding their respective class in the dedicated tab. Maximum Image Width: If you frequently upload large images to your website, you can enable the Maximum Image Width option that automatically resizes existing and future images whose width exceeds 2560 pixels. By optimizing image sizes, you can enhance your website performance and reduce bandwidth usage. You can customize your media optimisation to your specific needs using the filters, we’ve designed for this purpose. SPEED TEST Evaluate the optimization level of your website with Speed Optimizer’s Speed test tool. Our website performance check utilizes the robust capabilities of Google PageSpeed to provide comprehensive insights into your site’s optimization. By conducting the speed test, you will receive detailed results highlighting areas that can be further optimized for enhanced performance. These insights will empower you to fine-tune your website and unlock its maximum potential and increase conversions. Requirements In order to work correctly, this plugin requires that your server meets the following criteria: WordPress 4.7 PHP 7.0+ Our plugin uses a cookie in order to function properly. It does not store personal data and is used solely for the needs of our caching system. Data Collection Collection of technical data is optional and is listed here. This data is collected only for technical analysis, improvements and the possibility to contact the plugin user in case urgent issues need to be fixed (for example a critical security release that needs to be communicated to site owners). The plugin user can manage their preferences within the WP admin to control the collection of technical data. We advise opting in for this data collection, as it can enhance the plugin’s performance. You may find more information on data collection in our Plugins Privacy Notice. Credits Photo credits to Anna Shvets https://www.pexels.com/@shvetsa

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users: Users who are not logged in. Users who have not left a comment on your blog. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post. 99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them. The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways (ranked by speed): Expert. The fastest method is by using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “supercached” static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are “lighter”. This does require the Apache mod_rewrite module (which is probably installed if you have custom permalinks) and a modification of your .htaccess file which is risky and may take down your site if modified incorrectly. Simple. Supercached static files can be served by PHP and this is the recommended way of using the plugin. The plugin will serve a “supercached” file if it exists and it’s almost as fast as the mod_rewrite method. It’s easier to configure as the .htaccess file doesn’t need to be changed. You still need a custom permalink. You can keep portions of your page dynamic in this caching mode. WP-Cache caching. This is mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if supercaching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too. This mode is always enabled but you can disable caching for known users, URLs with parameters, or feeds separately. Set the constant “DISABLE_SUPERCACHE” to 1 in your wp-config.php if you want to only use WP-Cache caching. If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files then use simple mode. It’s easy to set up and very fast. Recommended Settings Simple caching. Compress pages. Don’t cache pages for known users. Cache rebuild. CDN support. Extra homepage checks. Garbage collection is the act of cleaning up cache files that are out of date and stale. There’s no correct value for the expiry time but a good starting point is 1800 seconds. Consider deleting the contents of the “Rejected User Agents” text box and allow search engines to cache files for you. Preload as many posts as you can and enable “Preload Mode”. Garbage collection of old cached files will be disabled. If you don’t care about sidebar widgets updating often set the preload interval to 2880 minutes (2 days) so all your posts aren’t recached very often. When the preload occurs the cache files for the post being refreshed is deleted and then regenerated. Afterwards a garbage collection of all old files is performed to clean out stale cache files. Even with preload mode enabled cached files will still be deleted when posts are modified or comments made. Development Active development of this plugin is handled on GitHub. Translation of the plugin into different languages is on the translation page. Documentation If you need more information than the following, you can have a look at the wiki or the Developer documentation. Preloading You can generate cached files for the posts, categories and tags of your site by preloading. Preloading will visit each page of your site generating a cached page as it goes along, just like any other visitor to the site. Due to the sequential nature of this function, it can take some time to preload a complete site if there are many posts. To make preloading more effective it can be useful to disable garbage collection so that older cache files are not deleted. This is done by enabling “Preload Mode” in the settings. Be aware however, that pages will go out of date eventually but that updates by submitting comments or editing posts will clear portions of the cache. Garbage Collection Your cache directory fills up over time, which takes up space on your server. If space is limited or billed by capacity, or if you worry that the cached pages of your site will go stale then garbage collection has to be done. Garbage collection happens on a regular basis and deletes old files in the cache directory. On the advanced settings page you can specify: 1. Cache timeout. How long cache files are considered fresh for. After this time they are stale and can be deleted. 2. Scheduler. Setup how often garbage collection should be done. 3. Notification emails. You can be informed on garbage collection job progress. There’s no right or wrong settings for garbage collection. It depends on your own site. If your site gets regular updates, or comments then set the timeout to 1800 seconds, and set the timer to 600 seconds. If your site is mostly static you can disable garbage collection by entering 0 as the timeout, or use a really large timeout value. The cache directory, usually wp-content/cache/ is only for temporary files. Do not ever put important files or symlinks to important files or directories in that directory. They will be deleted if the plugin has write access to them. CDN A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is usually a network of computers situated around the world that will serve the content of your website faster by using servers close to you. Static files like images, Javascript and CSS files can be served through these networks to speed up how fast your site loads. You can also create a “poor man’s CDN” by using a sub domain of your domain to serve static files too. OSSDL CDN off-linker has been integrated into WP Super Cache to provide basic CDN support. It works by rewriting the URLs of files (excluding .php files) in wp-content and wp-includes on your server so they point at a different hostname. Many CDNs support origin pull. This means the CDN will download the file automatically from your server when it’s first requested, and will continue to serve it for a configurable length of time before downloading it again from your server. Configure this on the “CDN” tab of the plugin settings page. This is an advanced technique and requires a basic understanding of how your webserver or CDNs work. Please be sure to clear the file cache after you configure the CDN. REST API There are now REST API endpoints for accessing the settings of this plugin. You’ll need to be authenticated as an admin user with permission to view the settings page to use it. This has not been documented yet but you can find all the code that deals with this in the “rest” directory. Custom Caching It is now possible to hook into the caching process using the add_cacheaction() function. Three hooks are available: ‘wp_cache_get_cookies_values’ – modify the key used by WP Cache. ‘add_cacheaction’ – runs in phase2. Allows a plugin to add WordPress hooks. ‘cache_admin_page’ – runs in the admin page. Use it to modify that page, perhaps by adding new configuration options. There is one regular WordPress filter too. Use the “do_createsupercache” filter to customize the checks made before caching. The filter accepts one parameter. The output of WP-Cache’s wp_cache_get_cookies_values() function. WP Super Cache has its own plugin system, loaded before most of WordPress. Add your own plugin either by putting it in the wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache-plugins directory, or by calling wpsc_add_plugin( $name ) with the full path to the plugin. The cookies used to identify “known users” can be modified with wpsc_add_cookie( $name ) and wpsc_delete_cookie( $name ). See plugins/searchengine.php as an example. Troubleshooting If things don’t work when you installed the plugin here are a few things to check: Is wp-content writable by the web server? Is there a wp-content/wp-cache-config.php ? If not, copy the file wp-super-cache/wp-cache-config-sample.php to wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and make sure WPCACHEHOME points at the right place. Is there a wp-content/advanced-cache.php ? If not, then you must copy wp-super-cache/advanced-cache.php into wp-content/. You must edit the file and change the path so it points at the wp-super-cache folder. If pages are not cached at all, remove wp-content/advanced-cache.php and recreate it, following the advice above. Make sure the following line is in wp-config.php and it is ABOVE the “require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);” line: define( 'WP_CACHE', true ); Try the Settings->WP Super Cache page again and enable cache. Look in wp-content/cache/supercache/. Are there directories and files there? Anything in your php error_log? If your browser keeps asking you to save the file after the super cache is installed you must disable Super Cache compression. Go to the Settings->WP Super Cache page and disable it there. File locking errors such as “failed to acquire key 0x152b: Permission denied in…” or “Page not cached by WP Super Cache. Could not get mutex lock.” are a sign that you may have to use file locking. Edit wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and uncomment “$use_flock = true” or set $sem_id to a different value. You can also disable file locking from the Admin screen as a last resort. Make sure cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock is writable by the web server if using coarse file locking. The cache folder cannot be put on an NFS or Samba or NAS share. It has to be on a local disk. File locking and deleting expired files will not work properly unless the cache folder is on the local machine. Garbage collection of old cache files won’t work if WordPress can’t find wp-cron.php. Check your access_logs for wp-cron.php entries and that your hostname resolves to the external IP address other servers on the network/Internet use. If old pages are being served to your visitors via the supercache, you may be missing Apache modules (or their equivalents if you don’t use Apache). 3 modules are required: mod_mime, mod_headers and mod_expires. The last two are especially important for making sure browsers load new versions of existing pages on your site. The error message, “WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The path to wp-cache-phase1.php in wp-content/advanced-cache.php must be fixed!” appears at the end of every page. Open the file wp-content/advanced-cache.php in your favourite editor. Is the path to wp-cache-phase1.php correct? This file will normally be in wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/. If it is not correct the caching engine will not load. Caching doesn’t work. The timestamp on my blog keeps changing when I reload. Check that the path in your .htaccess rules matches where the supercache directory is. You may have to hardcode it. Try disabling supercache mode. If supercache cache files are generated but not served, check the permissions on all your wp-content/cache/supercache folders (and each of wp-content cache and supercache folders) and wp-content/cache/.htaccess. If your PHP runs as a different user to Apache and permissions are strict Apache may not be able to read the PHP generated cache files. To fix you must add the following line to your wp-config.php (Add it above the WP_CACHE define.) Then clear your cache. umask( 0022 ); If you see garbage in your browser after enabling compression in the plugin, compression may already be enabled in your web server. In Apache you must disable mod_deflate, or in PHP zlib compression may be enabled. You can disable that in three ways. If you have root access, edit your php.ini and find the zlib.output_compression setting and make sure it’s “Off” or add this line to your .htaccess: php_flag zlib.output_compression off If that doesn’t work, add this line to your wp-config.php: ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 0); After uninstalling, your permalinks may break if you remove the WordPress mod_rewrite rules too. Regenerate those rules by visiting the Settings->Permalink page and saving that form again. If your blog refuses to load make sure your wp-config.php is correct. Are you missing an opening or closing PHP tag? Your front page is ok but posts and pages give a 404? Go to Settings->permalinks and click “Save” once you’ve selected a custom permalink structure. You may need to manually update your .htaccess file. If certain characters do not appear correctly on your website your server may not be configured correctly. You need to tell visitors what character set is used. Go to Settings->Reading and copy the ‘Encoding for pages and feeds’ value. Edit the .htaccess file with all your Supercache and WordPress rewrite rules and add this at the top, replacing CHARSET with the copied value. (for example, ‘UTF-8’) AddDefaultCharset CHARSET The error message, “WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The constant WPCACHEHOME must be set in the file wp-config.php and point at the WP Super Cache plugin directory.” appears at the end of every page. You can delete wp-content/advanced-cache.php and reload the plugin settings page or edit wp-config.php and look for WPCACHEHOME and make sure it points at the wp-super-cache folder. This will normally be wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/ but you’ll likely need the full path to that file (so it’s easier to let the settings page fix it). If it is not correct the caching engine will not load. If your server is running into trouble because of the number of semaphores used by the plugin it’s because your users are using file locking which is not recommended (but is needed by a small number of users). You can globally disable file locking by defining the constant WPSC_DISABLE_LOCKING, or defining the constant WPSC_REMOVE_SEMAPHORE so that sem_remove() is called after every page is cached but that seems to cause problems for other processes requesting the same semaphore. Best to disable it. Set the variable $htaccess_path in wp-config.php or wp-cache-config.php to the path of your global .htaccess if the plugin is looking for that file in the wrong directory. This might happen if you have WordPress installed in an unusual way.