WP-Optimize – Cache, Compress images, Minify & Clean database to boost page speed & performance vs DietPress

MORE THAN A CACHING PLUGIN WP-Optimize is trusted by more than 1 million WordPress website owners to boost performance and reduce page load times to improve your site’s user experiences and SERP rankings in Google. It does this in four clever ways: 1. It caches your site Caching is the process of storing a temporary HTML version of your site on the server so it can be retrieved more quickly for the user. It’s a sure-fire way to ensure web pages load at lightning-fast speed. Turn it on in just one click. 2. It compresses images Large images can really impact page speed load times. WP-Optimize makes it easy to identify and compress images to your preferred lossy / lossless settings in a couple of clicks. 3. It cleans the database Your WordPress database stores everything that you need, plus some things that you don’t. WP-Optimize cleans and optimizes the database to speed up your site and save server resources. 4. It minifies On top of its three main features, WP-Optimize Cache also has the more advanced minification feature. Together with caching, minification dramatically improves performance and page speed load time. 1. CACHE YOUR SITE Turn on caching in just one click: WP-Optimize automatically and optimally configures itself for your WordPress site. Turn it on in one-click or refine its settings if you prefer. More cache features: Cache preloading: This feature emulates a visit to your site, meaning cached files are served straight away, speeding up your site from the very first visit. GZIP Compression: When the server isn’t configured to do so, WP-Optimize delivers HTML, CSS and JS files to the user’s browser as smaller, compressed files, reducing the size of pages and style sheets by up to 90%! Preload key requests: Recommended by Google to improve page speed times. Critical resources (things like font files) get loaded first, so the page loads much faster [Premium]. Use cache settings to: Serve cached content to logged in users: Turn this on if content stays the same for logged in users (or turn on and exclude URLs where content does change e.g. my account areas). Exclude content from cache: Exclude by URL, conditional tags, browser agent strings or list cookies that should prevent caching when set (advanced user settings). Deliver device-specific cache: Serve separate cache files to desktop and mobile devices . This ensures that responsive features e.g. desktop and mobile menus are cached separately and served correctly. User per role cache: Useful if your website delivers different content to different user roles. e.g. an e-commerce site that displays different content to resellers or consumers [Premium]. User specific cache: Serves separate cache files to individual users. Useful for websites with personalised content e.g. Learning management systems [Premium]. Cache purging permissions: Select which user roles are allowed to purge the cache e.g. admin only or perhaps a ‘teacher’ role in an LMS setting only [Premium]. 2. COMPRESS IMAGES Lossy or lossless compression options: Choose between maximum space saving, best image quality or somewhere in-between. WebP conversion: Recommended by Google, WebP can achieve up to 34% smaller file sizes compared to JPEG and up to 26% compared to PNG. Auto-compress: Check a box and every new image you upload will automatically be compressed to your preferred lossy / lossless settings. Bulk compression: Compress every existing image on your site with the press of a button. Restore original: Gone too far? Revert images back to their original in one click. Retain EXIF image data: Check a box to retain EXIF image data during compression. Lazy Load: Webpages load much faster by loading web parts gradually, when they’re needed vs simultaneous loading of everything, all at once [Premium]. Delete orphaned images: Identify and delete unused images from your WordPress website, saving disk space [Premium]. Delete unused image sizes: WordPress creates multiple sizes for every uploaded image causing the uploads folder to become bloated. Scan for image sizes not in use and remove them to save further disk space [Premium]. 3. CLEAN AND OPTIMIZE THE DATABASE Cleans-up database tables, post revisions, auto draft posts, trashed posts, spam, trashed comments and more. Choose what to optimize or it’s one click to clean out the lot. Schedule clean-ups: So you can set and forget. Choose from daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Flexible clean-up schedules: You may wish to optimize database tables more frequently than you remove unapproved comments (for example). Choose the specific time and day when tasks should run [Premium]. Retain a set number of weeks’ data during clean-ups: Just in case you need to retrieve something. Back up before clean-ups: If you delete something you shouldn’t, restore it in a couple of clicks with UpdraftPlus. Power tweak – Turbo boost for WooCommerce: Unique to WP-Optimize, this power tweak boosts performance by replacing a slow query in WooCommerce with two much more efficient queries. E-commerce sites transacting high numbers of orders stand to gain here [Premium]. Power tweak – Boost performance by indexing the postmeta table: This unique power tweak works by allowing the WordPress postmeta table to be indexed, improving performance [Premium]. 4. MINIFY AND COMBINE HTML, CSS AND JAVASCRIPT Minify in just one click: Minifies HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Toggle on or off or customise each one under ‘settings’. Customise minification: Minify only (removing unnecessary code e.g line breaks and white spacing) or minify and merge. Apply the same or different settings to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Asynchronous loading: Choose non-critical CSS and JavaScript files to load in the background and independently of other resources e.g. analytics or pixel scripts. Loading asynchronously eliminates render blocking and improves page speed. Exclude files from being minified: Specify CSS and JavaScript files to exclude from minification. Optimize fonts: Optimize Font Awesome and Google Fonts. Inline the font files, inherit from CSS settings or load CSS / Javascript asynchronously instead. Preload assets: WP-Optimize visits each web page on your site so the code is minified and preloaded for real life users, right from their very first visit. Preload key requests: Recommended by Google to improve page speed times. Critical resources (things like font files) get loaded first, so the page loads much faster. WHY WP-OPTIMIZE? It’s brought to you by TeamUpdraft, the team behind the world’s most trusted backup, migration and restoration plugin. It’s easy to use. It packs a punch for a free plugin. WP-Optimize brings the best cache and optimization technology together into one single, seamless plugin to make your WordPress site fast, lean and efficient. PREMIUM FEATURES AT A GLANCE Our free version of WP-Optimize Cache is great, but we also have an even more powerful Premium version with extra features that offer the ultimate in freedom and flexibility: Multisite Support: extends database optimisations so they function for multiple WordPress sites at a time. If you manage more than one website, you will need WP-Optimize Cache Premium. Flexibility and Control: gives you the power to optimize select individual tables or a particular combination of tables on one or more WordPress websites, rather than having to optimize all database tables. Deleting unused and unwanted images: removes orphaned images from your WordPress site, plus images of a certain, pre-defined size. Sophisticated Scheduling: offers a wide range of options for scheduling automatic optimization. Specify an exact time and run clean-ups daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly and perform any number of additional once off optimizations. Seamless Graphical User Interface: for superb clarity in scheduling and managing of multi-site optimizations. WP-CLI support: provides a way to manage optimizations from command-line interface if you have lots of sites Lazy Loading: load only the images and part of a web-page when it is visible to the user so they can see something very quickly. Optimization Preview: gives users the ability to preview, select and remove data and records available for optimization from the database. Preload key requests: preload assets such as web fonts and icon fonts, as recommended by Google PageSpeed Insights. Premium support – caching is one of the most complex things you can do for a website, so premium support offers you peace of mind there’s someone to talk quickly to if you need any technical answers or help configuring the optimizations of cache settings for your website. Translations Translators are welcome to contribute to the plugin. Please use the WordPress translation website.

DietPress is a free WordPress speed optimization plugin with a built-in page cache. Page caching, browser caching, GZIP and Brotli compression, deferred JavaScript, critical CSS, image loading attributes, preloading, locally hosted Google Fonts and selective asset loading, all in one plugin and all free. And it goes further than a caching plugin: it also puts WordPress itself on a diet, switching off the features your site never uses. It pairs that with a clean, risk-based interface. Everything is configurable, the optimizations are already on by default, and nothing is hidden behind a paid tier. Activate it and your site is faster, or open the settings and tune every detail. By default WordPress loads functions, services and scripts that most sites do not need. They slow down loading times and consume hosting resources. DietPress lets you trim that fat and apply battle-tested performance tweaks, with a clear description of what each option does and what might break, organized by risk level so you always know what is safe. WHY CHOOSE DIETPRESS Page caching, for free. Serve anonymous visitors a copy stored on disk instead of building the page again. The feature people buy WP Rocket or a NitroPack subscription for, with no licence and no monthly fee. No drop-in, no changes to wp-config.php. Unlike WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, DietPress installs no advanced-cache.php and never edits wp-config.php. Switching it off leaves your site exactly as it was, with nothing orphaned behind. It tells you why. Most cache plugins leave you guessing when nothing is cached. DietPress reports its own status, tests itself against your home page, and names the exact reason a page was skipped. WooCommerce-safe by design. Carts, checkout, my account and any visitor carrying a cart cookie always get the live site, so nobody ever sees somebody else’s basket. Diet as well as speed. Where Perfmatters focuses on disabling scripts, DietPress covers that ground and adds page caching, critical CSS, local Google Fonts and a dashboard, admin and email cleanup, in one plugin. Light on your server. No account, no external service, no telemetry, no upsell nags. Everything runs on your own hosting. WHAT THE PAGE CACHE DOES TO YOUR RESPONSE TIME Measured on a WordPress 7.0 install with GeneratePress, WooCommerce and a 76 product catalogue, PHP 8.5, taking the median of 15 requests per URL. Your own hosting will give different figures, but the shape of the result will not change. Server response time, the same pages with the page cache off and on: Home page – 52.7 ms without, 15.1 ms with, 71% faster WooCommerce shop – 45.4 ms without, 14.8 ms with, 67% faster A 110 KB article – 43.0 ms without, 15.1 ms with, 65% faster A 98 KB page – 41.0 ms without, 14.9 ms with, 64% faster A product category – 41.3 ms without, 15.1 ms with, 63% faster The interesting part is not the percentage, it is that the cached figure barely moves. Serving a stored file costs the same whether the page was cheap or expensive to build, so the saving grows with the size of your site rather than with the power of your server. The heaviest page in the test is the one that gained most. It also changes how much traffic your hosting can take at once. In the same test the server went from serving about 40 visits a second to more than 210, five times as many, on exactly the same plan. That is what keeps a small site standing up when one of your posts does well. TWO THINGS IN ONE PLUGIN 1. Performance optimizations (on by default) Automatic Critical CSS inlined in the head (optional experimental deferral of non-critical CSS) JavaScript defer parsing with smart dependency handling Image loading attributes safety net: lazy loading, decoding=async and fetchpriority for images that bypass core Automatic image dimensions for better CLS scores (including picture elements) Resource hints: preconnect and DNS prefetch for common third-party origins Theme stylesheet, critical fonts and logo preloading for a faster LCP Google Fonts display=swap Google Fonts local hosting: serve the fonts your theme uses from your own server, GDPR-friendly with a silent fallback to the Google CDN (opt-in) Selective third-party loading: WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, block library, Slider Revolution, TablePress, Smash Balloon, Formidable Forms and Everest Forms assets only load where they are used (opt-in) RSS feed optimization (cache headers and item limit) Server rules in .htaccess: browser caching with a configurable lifetime for media, for styles and scripts and for fonts, GZIP and Brotli compression, immutable cache headers, CORS for fonts and keep-alive (master switch plus per-feature toggles) Database maintenance: daily expired-transient cleanup and safe query optimizations Page cache: store each page on disk and serve it to anonymous visitors without building it again, with automatic purging, gzip precompression and a status panel that says whether it is working (opt-in, in its own tab) 2. Put WordPress on a diet (risk-based, opt-in) Light (safe for any site): emojis, RSD/WLW tags, shortlinks, self-pingbacks, comment pagination, and more Moderate (evaluate first): oEmbed, jQuery Migrate, Dashicons on the frontend, Global Styles and Duotone, remote block patterns, avatars and Gravatar, comment threading, and more Strict (site-specific): granular RSS feed control, Heartbeat API mode, post revisions and autosave, disable comments, XML sitemap, native lazy loading/fetchpriority, content types, selective loading for WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, block assets, Slider Revolution, TablePress, Smash Balloon, Formidable Forms and Everest Forms, and more Widgets: dashboard widgets (including third-party ones from Yoast, WooCommerce, Elementor, Jetpack, Wordfence, Rank Math, Gravity Forms), classic sidebar widgets, block-editor widgets and the Customizer Emails: silence the automatic emails WordPress sends on its own, grouped by area: auto-update results for core, plugins and themes (plus the new-version notice), comment moderation and new-comment notices, and new user, password and email-change notices, plus toggles for the admin email verification prompt and post-by-email. Every option is off by default, and critical notices such as a failed core update are always kept SCALE, PROFILES AND ANALYZER Savings indicator: HTTP requests removed, CSS/JS saved and active optimizations at a glance Quick profiles: Personal Blog, WooCommerce Store, Landing Page and Maximum Cleanup Site analyzer: personalized recommendations based on your active plugins and content, page cache included Import and export your whole configuration as a JSON file COMPATIBILITY AND EXTENSIBILITY The plugin includes filters for developers: dietpress_critical_css – Customize the inline critical CSS dietpress_critical_css_handles – Define which CSS handles are critical dietpress_skip_defer_script_handles – Opt scripts out of the JavaScript defer dietpress_skip_defer_style_handles – Opt stylesheets out of the CSS deferral dietpress_preconnect_hints – Customize preconnect origins dietpress_dns_prefetch_domains – Customize DNS prefetch domains dietpress_critical_fonts – Define critical fonts to preload dietpress_exclude_local_fonts – Exclude Google Fonts stylesheets from local hosting dietpress_selective_{module}_has_content – Mark a page as showing the content of a selective loading module, so its assets are kept. The module is wc, cf7, formidable, everest_forms or revslider dietpress_selective_{module}_styles / dietpress_selective_{module}_scripts – Adjust the handles removed by each module dietpress_selective_page_hides_content – Mark a page as rendering content the content scan cannot reach, so no module removes anything (this is what handles Elementor) dietpress_selective_is_wc_page – Override the WooCommerce page detection of selective loading dietpress_selective_wc_keep_cart_fragments – Keep the cart fragments script when your theme has a hand-coded mini-cart dietpress_selective_cf7_has_form – Mark pages that load a Contact Form 7 form dynamically dietpress_selective_blocks_dequeue – Override the block library dequeue decision dietpress_selective_everest_forms_dequeue_dashicons – Keep Dashicons when another plugin enqueues it directly dietpress_native_sitemap_in_use – Tell DietPress your plugin builds on the native WordPress sitemap, so the option that removes it becomes unavailable dietpress_cache_bypass – Keep the current page out of the page cache dietpress_cache_bypass_cookies – Adjust the cookie name prefixes that make a visitor uncacheable dietpress_cache_ignored_params – Adjust the query parameters that do not change the page dietpress_cache_exclude_urls – Adjust the excluded URL patterns dietpress_cache_post_urls – Adjust the URLs purged along with a post Compatible with: Well-coded themes and page builders (Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Bricks Gutenberg) Cache plugins (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc.). The one exception is the optional page cache module, which will not run beside another page cache and says so; everything else in DietPress works alongside them as it always has Security plugins (DietPress focuses on performance and deliberately leaves security to them; we recommend our free Vigilant) CDNs (Cloudflare, StackPath, KeyCDN, etc.) thanks to CORS and Vary headers WordPress Multisite (except the optional page cache module, which does not support it yet) HOW TO VERIFY THE OPTIMIZATIONS Cache rules: check your .htaccess for a block marked # BEGIN DietPress with immutable Cache-Control headers Logo preload: view page source and look for pointing to your logo Critical CSS: view source and look for in the head Compression: test at giftofspeed.com/gzip-test Always measure with tools like Google PageSpeed, GTMetrix or WebPageTest, and run each test at least twice to account for caching. Support Need private support or custom development? Do you need one-on-one help, priority troubleshooting, or a custom feature, integration, or tweak built specifically for your site? I offer private support and custom development. Just contact me and tell me what you need. Need help or have suggestions? Official website WordPress support forum YouTube channel Documentation and tutorials Love the plugin? Please leave us a 5-star review and help spread the word! About AyudaWP We are specialists in WordPress security, SEO, AI and performance optimization plugins. We create tools that solve real problems for WordPress site owners while maintaining the highest coding standards and accessibility requirements.