WP Performance – cache plugin review

This is a shoutout to Ante Laca (GitHub) for this wonderful plugin.

I’ve had a chance to try it on a few client sites and really enjoyed what I’m seeing so far. Let’s go over some nice qualities and how it stacks up against the current landscape of cache plugins.

My short experience with WP Performance (WPP)

Introduction of WPP in 2018

WPP came out over a year ago. (Almost 2 years ago, I think.) At the time, it was very clear to me Ante was somewhat copying the Breeze cache plugin but adding on top of it. It caught a lot of attention on WordPress performance groups for being another potential great free cache plugin…but ultimately didn’t have the giant user share like Swift, nor the gimmicky marketing hype like WP Rocket.

Many users still enjoyed it, but it remained in the back corner as simply “an alternative cache plugin” for when all your other ones didn’t work. (Hahaha).

But like many others, I had no real reason to switch over my workflow for a new cache plugins when my existing ones already did the job just fine.

Actually using WPP in 2020

This plugin has certainly come a long way since I tried it and definitely deserving to be featured. It all came down to a problem client site I had. He had an issue with some poorly coded theme & plugins that exhausted server resources with inefficient DB queries. My usual go-to cache plugins wouldn’t work unless he swapped out his problem plugins.

So to try and make things work, I shopped around for alternative plugins and remembered WPP. I activated and *BOOM*, it worked like a charm. The site was functional while we hack-fixed somebody else’s broken code. His large sports site with tons of participant registrations was able to stay online. And WPP saved the day.

PS: we’ve since switched back to our usual cache plugin after the code was fixed but I plan to try WPP more on simple sites.

Features & Strengths

WPP features:

• Caching – duh! Static page caching, browser caching. It doesn’t have object caching (which I don’t feel is necessary for most people).
• Cache preload via sitemap – this is such a clever and simple implementation. It allows you to cache the site accurately and in order of most important to least important pages. It’s also less likely to eat up too many resources preloading internal CPT urls like how other cache plugins typically do it.
• CSS/JS optimization – it can minify and combine and disable. The UI is so awesome! It allows you to easily exclude specific assets from combination, and also choosing which pages to disable certain assets.
• HTML optimizations – minify, remove comments/attributes/quotes.
• MEDIA optimization – lazy load for images & videos. Also simple settings to exclude images from lazy load by name or class. Same for excluding video embed lazy load by page url. This is useful for excluding ATF items from lazy load.
• DATABASE cleanup – deleting the usual trash, spam, revisions, transients, tasks, drafts.
• CDN – compatible with CDN and also Cloudflare proxy.
• SETTINGS – import/export settings, and enable logging for troubleshooting.
• DYNAMIC PRELOAD – if you want to preload links upon hover.
• VARNISH INTEGRATION – will clear varnish cache.

WPP strengths:

• FAST – yes, your site will run beautifully fast with WPP enabled.
• RELIABLE – coded beautifully. Lean with zero bloat.
• FULL-FEATURED – has many awesome caching-related features and incredible granular settings to manage them.
• LEAN – doesn’t have all the extra features that many other cache plugins put to help justify their cost. (Things like image-optimization, etc.) Also being simpler means it’s less likely to cause any weird conflict issues.
• CLEAN UI – I love the user interface. So simple and easy to understand. Logical for admins, yet easy for end users. You can configure many things without having to dig through settings screens and “remember” where things are. Things that don’t apply to you stay hidden.
• OPTIMIZATION EXCLUSION – what this cache plugin has (and does so well) that no other cache plugin has is the ability to exclude certain assets or urls from optimization. This is fantastic for people trying to do complex optimizations without conflict. I loved how he did it!
• DETAILED DEVELOPER – you can definitely see the developer cares about his plugin. Even little things like how he split the added htaccess stuff to the top and bottom of your htaccess (rather than everything shoved into the top) is a nice touch. Little details like this always give away the quality of someone’s code.

Great speed, beautifully simple UI. Can do basic caching or even more advanced caching. Most of all, it worked well for my use. I’m typically a LiteSpeed Cache and Swift user…but really enjoyed this one. I’m sure it can cache small or large sites well. Thanks for such a great free cache plugin, Ante!

Do you want a simple free cache plugin with just enough advanced features, but not feel too technical?

• Then get WP Performance cache plugin!