For a long time, WordPress speed plugins have been sitting on their success optimizing Pagespeed. It’s time now to see how they perform optimizing the real deal: Core Web Vitals.
Nowadays, Wp Rocket is behind many plugins, and it has even been unrecommended by popular plugins due to the issues it causes.
Even though WP Rocket supports different caching solutions (Redis, Memcache, and Varnish) and also many hosting providers, it doesn’t have relatively good “server metrics”(TTFB).
TTFB is where most WordPress sites suffer. Flyingpress stands out in this metric.
Flyingpress
Flyingpress is a caching plugin, developed by the creator of the Flying Script plugin, and website wpspeedmatters.com.
Flyingpress’s main difference from other caching plugins may be their newly released features, such as Prioritize Resources, which directly improve the LCP(largest contentful paint) Core Web Vitals. LCP is one metric where WordPress falls apart from other technologies.
Flyingpress also stands out by having good “server metrics”(TTFB). It has a lot of built-in optimizations for it. Having bad TTFB is one of the main reasons for having bad LCP.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters isn’t a caching plugin, but you can fix your Core Web Vitals and Pagespeed using only it, even for themes like Elementor.
Perfmatters “Script Manager” lists all your scripts and allows you to remove them from loading by device, location, group of users, or using a regex formula.
Perfmatters 20% OFF Coupon: WPALPHA
You can access Perfmatters documentation to determine what effect each feature will have and how to fix any issues if encountered. Perfmatters also offers “Testing Mode“, which safely previews features before applying them to the live website.
Perfmatters have many features made directly to improve Woocommerce. If you are using Woocommerce as your choice to have a store online, you must know that your competitors may be using faster alternatives such as Shopify. These features are essential not to have a slower site and worse user experience than the competition.
Another feature of Perfmatters is database optimization. It offers not only full database optimization but also scheduled automatic database optimization.
Other notable Perfmatters features:
- Change your WordPress login URL: change wp-login to avoid hacking or bots.
- Google Analytics locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- CDN rewrite.
- Add code to header, body, and footer.
- Preloading: Preload images only necessary, improving Core Web Vitals.
- Defer and delay JavaScript.
- Remove unused CSS: creates a different CSS file with removed unused CSS.
- Google Fonts locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- Multisite support.
Cloudflare APO and Cloudflare Pro
Cloudflare Automatic Optimization is a new tool to improve WordPress TTFB. Cloudflare made a study and concluded that APO optimized their WordPress client’s websites TTFB for a 72% improvement.
Not only that, but their clients’ FCP(First Content Paint) and Speed Index improved by 22% and 13%, respectively. Cloudflare APO setup requires changing your domain DNS records.
Cloudflare currently offers Automatic Platform Optimizations (APO) for $5/month, and it caches the HTML of your WordPress website. This is possible due to Cloudflare Workers that cache dynamic content.
Cloudflare APO is compatible with WP Rocket and many other plugins; check the compatibility.
Cloudflare Pro is another service that, at $20/month, offers a myriad of features, including:
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Lossless Image Optimization
- 20 Page Rules (+17 than the free plan) – These are meant to improve WordPress usage overall
Cloudflare Pro and Cloudflare APO can be used alongside many other WordPress cache plugins, paid or free.
Get your WordPress website optimized!
