Swift Performance Lite vs WP Super Cache

The need for Speed. Cache & Performance plugin for WordPress! You created it, we keep it fast! Did you know that…… You Have Just 3 Seconds To Impress Your Visitor. Don’t Lose It By Slow Loading. 95% of customer’s don´t wait if a website takes longer than 5-6 seconds to load! Yes, that´s a big number. People spend a lot of time and money on building websites and even more on marketing to get traffic… but what happens when those people come to your website and the website is slow to load? You lose sales. Slow loading websites lose visitors and sales. But we have a solution! Say goodbye to slow loading websites and say hello to Swift Performance Lite or Pro! Get a complete Cache & Performance plugin for free or as a pro. Swift Performance will increase the loading speed of any WordPress website and provides an intelligent, modern caching system. You can even cache AJAX request, dynamic pages, and you can add exceptions (URL, page or content based rules). Here are some of our most popular functions. Caching. Page caching is working out of the box. It is compatible with WooCommerce, bbPress, Cloudflare and Varnish as well. It will boost your performance, improve SEO scores, and create a better user experience. CSS and Javascript optimization. One of the most important thing for performance is optimize the delivery of static resources. Swift Performance not only combines and minifies the CSS files, but generates the Critical CSS for each page automatically. Also Javascripts (even inline scripts) can be combined, minified, and move to footer without any conflict. Huge combined javascript files may still be render blocking, however with our unique Async Execute solution, you can not only combine/minify the scripts, but you can run them individually as soon as a chunk has been downloaded – which provides incredibly fast JS execution, improves SEO scores and user experience. Database Optimization. Keeping your database clean is extremely important for speed. Swift Performance has a built in DB Optimizer to clean expired transients, orphans, duplicated metadata, and spammy comments. You can also schedule every tasks. It has never been easier to keep your WordPress database clean. Plugin Organizer. Plugins are a big part of WordPress, however sometimes not properly written plugins can cause performance issues. With Plugin Organizer you can disable plugins on certain pages, and let plugins run only where it is really necessary. You can set URL match, Frontend, Admin Pages, AJAX action rules and exceptions to get the best results. Why you should install Swift Performance Lite? After reading this exhaustive features, you can probably imagine why Swift Performance is the best Cache & Performance solution for WordPress. It is both easy and powerful. Optimizing WordPress performance is not rocket science anymore. Our unique Setup Wizard will help you to configure the basic settings and improve WordPress performance. We hear your voice! We are continuously improving the plugin, based on customer’s feedback & needs. This is one of the most important factors & mission. Give Swift Performance a try. Want to unlock more features? Upgrade to our Pro version. Why should you upgrade to Pro? We added our secret ingredients to make a product for our professional users, the result is Swift Performance Pro. Compute API. Compute API will speed up merging process and decrease CPU usage. Compute API also provides advanced JS minify, which should be used if default JS minification cause issues on your site. Compute API also provides Critical Font option, with that you can reduce font icon files’ size. This feature is essential for shared hosting users, as CPU usage is usually limited for shared hosting plans. Critical Icon Fonts. With Critical Fonts feature you can select icons that you are actually using on your site, and generate customized icon font set from them. There is also a feature to search used icons in your theme/plugins, posts, options, etc. Once you selected the icons that you need, you can enqueue them with one click. If critical icon fonts are enqueued, the plugin will block the original version of the font CSS/font files. Unlimited Image Optimizer. With Image Optimizer you can optimize every images on your site. It will scan the whole site, and pick up every image from themes, plugins and upload folder. Regarding that Image Optimizer is unlimited (no additional fees), you can save a considerable amount of money. You can select images individually, and run batch optimization. Default image quality can be specified in plugin settings, however you can overwrite it before starting the optimization on selected images. Schedule DB Optimizer. Both Pro and Lite versions comes with Database Optimizer. However in Pro you can set scheduled optimization, so you won’t need to do it manually. Whitelabel. With whitelabel option you can re-brand Swift Performance. You can change the plugin name, description, author, even the database prefix for the plugin. Remote Cron. Pro version provides a Remote Cron option. If you set the remote cron, our API server will call wp-cron.php and run WP cronjobs as real cronjobs. Extended WooCommerce Features. With Pro version you can’t just cache, but totally disable cart fragments AJAX calls. Pro also provide session cache, with that you can cache and preload dynamic pages like cart and checkout page for WooCommerce. Continuous Plugin Updates. While Swift Performance Lite is maintained as well, these updates are only compatibility updates, however Pro version comes with regular updates which contains new features. Also Pro version has a Beta tester option, if you enable it, you will get updates more frequently. FAQ Installation instructions Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress Run the Setup wizard, or use the Tools->Swift Performance screen to configure the plugin Why should I use Swift Performance plugin? Swift Performance is an all-in-one WordPress performance booster plugin. It provides everything that you need to speed up your WordPress site (replacing several optimization plugins), and improve user’s website experience. Swift Performance is already running on 2.000+ websites and based on our customers’ feedback it is the fastest performance plugin on the market. With the Setup Wizard you can easily configure the plugin and in the same time you have power of setup & control of all settings manually. Strange redirects If you have strange URLs in your analytics or you can see that the site redirects to an URL like this: https://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/cache/yoursite.com/desktop/unauthenticated/index.html This is caused by an improper order of htaccess rules. Probably you are using a force SSL or force www/non-www rule in htaccess. Please remove these rules from .htaccess, and insert them in Settings > General > Tweaks > Custom htaccess. My website broke It is possible that one or multiple files generate conflicts when those are merged and/or minified. If you notice that you website doesn´t show correctly, you might disable merge scripts and styles. High CPU Usage While Swift is generating the cache, the CPU usage can be higher than usual. Swift is using more aggressive optimization than any other plugin on the market and it needs some CPU. Usually it isn’t an issue and CPU usage can be increased temporarily, but if it goes back to normal after prebuild finished, you don’t need to worry about it. However, for large sites on relatively small server it can cause too high CPU usage temporarily. Actually, when the server is using CPU it is always using 100%. High usage means the CPU was used for a longer period. If CPU usage is constantly higher you may need check the configuration. It is recommended to: Enable Compute API: Settings > General > Compute API Enable Optimize Prebuild Only: Settings > Optimization > General > Optimize Prebuild Only If you are not satisfied with Optimize Prebuild Only option, enable Optimize in background instead: Settings > Optimization > General > Optimize in Background. Setting a low number of threads as maximum: Settings > Optimization > General > Maximum threads: set this to 2 or 1. 1 will make the pre-build a bit slow, so try 2 first. Exclude third party CSS: Settings > Optimization > Styles> Exclude 3rd Party CSS. Disable Generate Critical CSS as generating Critical CSS is the most CPU intensive process: Settings > Optimization > Styles> Generate Critical CSS. Exclude third party JS: Settings > Optimization > Scripts > Exclude 3rd Party Scripts. Set Cache Expiry Mode to Action based, if you are not using nonce or anything that can expire on frontend: Settings > Caching > General > Cache Expiry Mode: Action based. Enable Prebuild Cache Automatically: Settings > Caching > Warmup > Prebuild Cache Automatically. Setup lower Limit prebuild speed (recommended to use on limited shared hosting): Settings > Caching > Warmup > Prebuild Speed: Moderate (or Slow). Exclude post types that you wouldn’t like to cache. Autoconfig should find most and exclude them automatically but you can can add them manually: Settings > Caching > Exceptions> Exclude Post Types. Key Features Quick Setup, Page Cache, Cache Preloading, Gzip Compression, Browser Caching, Remove Query Strings, Lazyload, Minify CSS, Minify JS, Combine JS/CSS, Async Execute Combined JS, Defer JS, CDN Support, Cloudflare Support, Varnish Support, Mobile Detection, Multisite Compatibility, Woocommerce Friendly, WPML Support, Cache For Logged In Users, Database Optimizer, Import/Export, DNS Prefetch, Critical CSS On The Fly, Plugin Organizer, Appcache, AJAX Cache, Proxy 3rd Party JS, Inline Small Images, Google Analytics Bypass, Heartbeat Control Reviews Swift Performance Review by WPMediaMastery Swift Performance Comparison by Alentejo Webdesign Easy Setup

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.