SpinupWP vs WP Optimizer – PageSpeed, Cache, Minify & Core Web Vitals

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

WP Optimizer is a free, modular WordPress cache and performance optimization plugin built to make WordPress faster, lighter and easier to diagnose. Improve page speed and Core Web Vitals with page caching, HTML/CSS/JavaScript minification, browser caching, GZIP/Brotli compression, lazy loading, LCP optimization, local image compression, WebP conversion, database cleanup and performance monitoring — from one dashboard. Unlike optimization tools that depend on a mandatory external service, WP Optimizer’s core optimization features run on your own server. No subscription or premium upgrade is required to unlock the performance modules listed below. Already using another cache or optimization plugin? WP Optimizer is modular: enable only the tools you need and leave overlapping modules disabled. Optimize WordPress Performance WP Optimizer combines the most common WordPress performance optimizations in one plugin: Page Cache – Store complete HTML responses on disk and serve eligible cached pages before WordPress loads. Browser Cache – Configure caching policies for CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts and other static resources. GZIP & Brotli Compression – Generate supported server rules to reduce transferred page size. HTML, CSS & JavaScript Minification – Minify page output and local assets, with optional CSS and JavaScript combination. Lazy Loading – Lazy load images and iframes and prevent unnecessary video preloading. LCP Optimization – Preload a detected Largest Contentful Paint image with high fetch priority. Font Optimization – Apply font-display: swap and optionally defer font stylesheets. Navigation Prefetching – Prefetch eligible same-origin links when visitors show navigation intent. Local Image Optimization – Compress images and generated thumbnails using Imagick or GD. WebP Conversion – Convert supported images to WebP directly on your server. Automatic Media Optimization – Process new uploads and larger media-library jobs in background batches. Database Optimization – Clean revisions, transients, orphaned metadata, spam and other unnecessary database data. Object Cache – Optional Redis or Memcached integration when the required service and PHP extension are available. WP_Query & Database Query Cache – Cache selected expensive WordPress and database query results. WP Optimizer can be used as a complete WordPress performance toolkit or alongside an existing setup when overlapping optimization layers are disabled. Measure Before and After – Don’t Guess Optimization is more useful when you can verify what actually changed. Page Test compares a baseline request with WP Optimizer bypassed against your current warmed configuration. It reports metrics including: Response time Time to First Byte (TTFB) Peak memory usage Response size Slow database queries Repeated queries Expensive WordPress hooks and callbacks This makes it easier to determine whether a configuration is actually improving your site instead of enabling performance options blindly. Find Slow Plugins and Database Queries The built-in Performance Monitor helps identify where WordPress is spending time and resources. It can profile: Plugin load time Theme load time WordPress core load time SQL execution time Query count Memory usage Slow database queries Cache hits and misses Slow requests Callback execution time Use configurable sampling and slow-request thresholds to investigate performance problems without permanently profiling every request. If your WordPress site has a high TTFB or slow backend, Performance Monitor can help identify whether the bottleneck comes from a plugin, theme, database query or WordPress itself. Page Cache WP Optimizer includes a configurable static page cache for WordPress. Eligible rendered HTML pages can be stored on disk and served using server-specific rules before a normal WordPress request needs to finish loading. Cache controls include: Cache lifetime rules URL inclusion and exclusion rules Query-string handling User scope Status-code rules Cookie exclusions User-agent exclusions Automatic cache invalidation Content-aware purging Cache hit and miss statistics Disk usage statistics When WordPress content changes, affected cache entries can be invalidated automatically. WooCommerce-sensitive pages and sessions are automatically excluded where required. Object, WP_Query and Database Caching WP Optimizer provides multiple optional caching layers. Object Cache Install a WordPress object-cache.php drop-in and use Redis or Memcached when a compatible PHP extension and service are available. WP_Query Cache Cache selected WordPress query results with configurable lifetimes and invalidation behavior. Database Query Cache Cache eligible database responses and invalidate related entries when WordPress content changes. Each cache layer can be configured independently. Redis or Memcached is not required to use WP Optimizer’s page cache, browser cache, minification, compression, image optimization or database tools. HTML, CSS and JavaScript Optimization WP Optimizer can optimize: Rendered HTML Inline CSS Inline JavaScript Local CSS files Local JavaScript files Generated optimized assets are cached on disk. Already-minified resources are skipped when possible, relative CSS paths are preserved, and compatibility safeguards prevent known page-builder editing and preview requests from being transformed. CSS and JavaScript combination is optional. For best compatibility, enable HTML, CSS and JavaScript optimization separately and test the site after each change. Image Optimization and WebP Optimize WordPress images locally without requiring an external image optimization service. WP Optimizer can: Compress Media Library images Compress generated WordPress thumbnails Convert supported images to WebP Resize oversized images Preserve EXIF metadata when requested Optimize new uploads automatically Process larger libraries in background batches Add missing image width and height attributes when metadata is available Lazy load images Identify potentially unused media files Image processing uses Imagick or GD on your own server. Core Web Vitals Optimization WP Optimizer includes multiple optimizations that can improve the technical factors behind Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). These include: Page caching Browser caching GZIP/Brotli compression HTML/CSS/JavaScript minification Image compression WebP conversion Image and iframe lazy loading Missing image dimension fixes LCP image preloading Font display optimization Font stylesheet optimization Navigation prefetching Reduced unnecessary WordPress output Actual Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed results depend on your theme, plugins, hosting, content, third-party scripts and configuration. WP Optimizer does not promise a specific PageSpeed score. Use Page Test, Performance Monitor and external testing tools to verify the result on your own site. Database Cleanup and Autoload Health A slow WordPress database can increase backend and frontend response times. WP Optimizer includes tools to inspect and maintain your WordPress database. Clean or manage: Post revisions Auto drafts Trashed posts Spam comments Transients Orphaned metadata Database tables Large wp_options entries Autoloaded options The database module can also: Optimize selected tables Create SQL backups Restore SQL backups Inspect option size Inspect autoload status Disable autoload for selected options Delete selected options Create a database backup before changing or deleting data you are not familiar with. Media Cleaner The Media Cleaner can scan the WordPress Media Library or a selected uploads directory for files that do not appear to be referenced by WordPress content. Detected files can be: Reviewed Ignored Deleted Always review detected files before deleting them. Themes, plugins and custom code can reference media in ways that WordPress cannot automatically discover. WooCommerce Compatibility WP Optimizer includes automatic safeguards for WooCommerce. Sensitive WooCommerce requests such as: Cart Checkout My Account WooCommerce sessions Cart actions Relevant API requests are automatically excluded from incompatible caching and runtime HTML optimization. Content changes can automatically invalidate affected cache entries. Page Builder Compatibility WP Optimizer detects editing and preview requests from supported page builders, including: Elementor Beaver Builder Divi Gutenberg Bricks Oxygen Breakdance Editing and preview requests bypass incompatible caching and output transformations, while sensitive generated builder assets and markup are protected from minification where required. Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed WP Optimizer detects and supports multiple common WordPress server environments. Apache and LiteSpeed Enterprise Managed server rules can be written to the local .htaccess file. Nginx WP Optimizer generates an Nginx configuration file. The generated configuration must be included in the website server block and Nginx must then be reloaded. OpenLiteSpeed WP Optimizer can generate compatible rewrite rules for direct cache delivery, redirects and rewrite-based security controls. Enable Auto Load from .htaccess for the appropriate virtual host. Compression, response headers, MIME types and other non-rewrite server settings should be configured through OpenLiteSpeed WebAdmin where required. Cloudflare Integration WP Optimizer can optionally integrate with Cloudflare using a configured API token and Zone ID. The integration can: Test Cloudflare credentials Purge cached content by host Purge cache tags Purge the complete zone cache Automatically purge the configured Cloudflare cache when the local WP Optimizer page cache is cleared Cloudflare is optional and is not required for WP Optimizer’s local optimization features. Safer Performance Testing and Recovery Performance settings can interact differently with every combination of theme, plugins, server and hosting configuration. WP Optimizer therefore includes configuration backup and recovery tools. Before the main settings are changed, WP Optimizer can create an automatic configuration snapshot. The latest configuration backups can be reviewed, restored or deleted from the Settings module. If a fatal error is caused by WP Optimizer or by a WP Optimizer-managed cache drop-in, the recovery system can attempt to: Restore a previous working configuration Remove plugin-managed cache drop-ins Remove generated server rules Clear generated cache data Remove minified resources Remove direct-cache files Reset scheduled optimization tasks Reset WP Optimizer to factory settings Recovery actions do not reset unrelated themes, plugins or server configuration. More WordPress Maintenance Tools Performance is the main focus, but WP Optimizer also provides optional maintenance and administration modules. These include: Cron & Heartbeat Inspect WordPress cron events Create, edit, run or delete cron events Manage custom schedules Reduce unnecessary frontend cron checks Configure the wp-admin Heartbeat interval Schedule automatic database and media optimization WordPress Cleanup Optionally disable unnecessary WordPress output or functionality such as: Emojis XML-RPC Feeds oEmbed Selected REST access Shortlinks Relational links WordPress sitemap jQuery Migrate Dashicons Global Styles Widgets Comments Selected Block Editor functionality Security Hardening Optional WordPress and server hardening controls include: Directory listing protection HTTP TRACE protection Sensitive configuration-file protection HSTS MIME-sniffing protection Referrer policy Frame protection Reduced WordPress/server version disclosure Basic user-enumeration protection WordPress file-editor disabling Activity Log Record selected: User actions Post actions Term actions Attachment changes Option changes Plugin actions Optional suspicious-request monitoring can detect patterns commonly associated with XSS, SQL injection, path traversal, command injection and sensitive-file probes. SMTP & Mail Logging Configure WordPress SMTP transport and optionally record outgoing email for troubleshooting. WordPress Update Controls Control WordPress core and plugin update checks, automatic updates, update notices and related notification emails. System Information Inspect WordPress, PHP, database, web server, filesystem and storage information from one dashboard. Local-First and Modular WP Optimizer does not require a mandatory optimization SaaS or subscription for its core features. Page caching, minification, image optimization, WebP conversion, database optimization, diagnostics and performance monitoring can run on your own WordPress server. Optional integrations such as Cloudflare only communicate with external services when you configure and use those integrations. Optional error-reporting or telemetry functionality can be controlled separately. Most importantly, you do not have to enable everything. If you already have a preferred cache plugin, CDN or another optimization tool, disable overlapping WP Optimizer modules and use only the features that complement your existing stack. Do not let two plugins manage the same optimization layer at the same time, especially: Page cache Object cache Database/query cache HTML/CSS/JavaScript minification Asset combination Generated server rules Recommended Setup For an existing or production WordPress site: Open WP Optimizer → WP Info and review your server environment. Create a database backup. Start with browser caching and supported compression. Configure image optimization and WebP. Enable the WP Optimizer schedule if you want automatic image or database maintenance. Enable page cache. Clear the cache and test important pages. Enable HTML minification and test again. Enable CSS optimization and test again. Enable JavaScript optimization and test again. Test forms, search, login, WooCommerce cart/account/checkout and other dynamic pages. Run Page Test to compare the result. Use Performance Monitor if you still have slow requests, plugins or database queries. Avoid enabling multiple aggressive optimization options simultaneously on an existing production site. Free Performance Features – No Premium-Locked Modules WP Optimizer is free and the performance modules described on this page are not locked behind a premium upgrade. That includes: Static page cache Browser caching GZIP/Brotli configuration HTML/CSS/JavaScript minification Lazy loading LCP optimization Font optimization Local image compression WebP conversion WP_Query cache Database query cache Redis/Memcached object-cache integration Database cleanup Autoload analysis Cron management Page Test Performance Monitor Cloudflare cache purging Configuration backups and recovery Use one plugin as a complete optimization toolkit, or enable only the individual modules your site needs.