Speedora Total Website Speed Optimization vs SQLite Object Cache

Speedora is a free, all-in-one speed plugin. It caches pages, minifies HTML/CSS/JS, lazy-loads media, converts images to WebP, and removes unused WordPress baggage. Settings are grouped by feature, and child options stay locked until their parent is enabled. Do not run Speedora page cache together with another page-cache plugin (WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, and similar). Use one page cache at a time. Page caching File-based full-page cache for guests (optional cache for logged-in users) Separate cache files for mobile/desktop and for Polylang/WPML languages Cache lifetime, automatic purge on update, and smart purge of the changed URL Cache preload for homepage, sitemap URLs, and newly published posts Skip URLs with query strings (tracking parameters such as utm_source are allowed) Never-cache list (path fragments such as /cart/) WooCommerce: do not cache cart, checkout, or account pages Cache hits send the X-Speedora-Cache header Browser cache and gzip Cache-Control, ETag, and Last-Modified on HTML when page cache is off Apache .htaccess expires for CSS, JS, images, and fonts Apache gzip/deflate for HTML, CSS, JS, and SVG Rules are written with WordPress insert_with_markers (marker: Speedora) HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Minify HTML (whitespace, comments, optional inline CSS/JS) Minify local CSS and JS into copies under uploads (skips wp-includes) Exclusion lists by handle or filename Load CSS asynchronously, unload listed stylesheets, optional critical CSS Remove ?ver= from asset URLs Defer or async JS (jQuery is never deferred) Delay JS until first interaction (overrides defer/async while enabled) Images and video Lazy load images and iframes Priority-load the first content image (LCP) and decoding=”async” WebP conversion on upload (PHP GD with WebP) and serve .webp when the file exists Optional lossy WebP quality Resize oversized originals to a maximum width YouTube click-to-play: thumbnail until the visitor clicks Fonts, DNS, and CDN Google Fonts display=swap Host Google Fonts locally (downloads CSS and woff2 into uploads) Optional font preload URLs and lazy-load of Google Fonts stylesheets DNS prefetch, preconnect, and hero-image preload Instant internal-link prefetch (Chrome Speculation Rules) CDN URL rewriting for wp-content and wp-includes Optional Cloudflare cache purge (API token + zone ID) WordPress, WooCommerce, and database Remove emoji, wp-embed, Dashicons (guests), generator tag, shortlink, REST discovery links Optional: disable RSS, XML-RPC, comments, jQuery Migrate, file editor Heartbeat interval and disable Heartbeat on the public site Delay Analytics, Ads, Meta pixel, YouTube, Maps, and chat widgets until interaction WooCommerce: disable cart fragments and shop CSS/JS off shop pages Database cleanup: revisions, drafts, trash, spam, transients, OPTIMIZE TABLE Limit how many revisions WordPress stores going forward WP-Cron schedules for cache cleanup, DB cleanup, image optimize, and preload Safe mode turns every optimization off without wiping settings Admin tools Settings tabs: Caching, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images, Network, Database, WordPress, Core Web Vitals, Automation Dependent options (greyed out until the parent is on) Diagnostics score and recommendations Tools: clear cache, one-click DB cleanup, batch images, import/export, reset Per-post/page CSS and JS unload meta box Admin bar: clear cache

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.