Perfmatters WordPress Plugin

We developed the Perfmatters plugin with simplicity in mind. We use all of these optimizations on our own sites and are excited to provide an easy way for you to now have them too! No messing around with code or your functions.php file. Performance optimizations shouldn’t have to be complicated and so everything can be enabled/disabled with a single click.

The main way this plugin helps speed up your site is by disabling scripts that might not be used on your site. For example, by default emojis load on every single page of your site. If you don’t use them, this is simply slowing it down. By disabling it, the script no longer loads and so it reduces your overall number of HTTP requests and your page size.

Another helpful feature is our database optimization. Over time things like revisions, auto-drafts, spam comments, and transients start to fill up your database and before you know it, it’s impacting the performance of your site. With Perfmatters you can easily clean all of these up and even put limits in place to prevent it from happening again. This ensures a fast and snappy database.

Quick-toggle options

Many of the Perfmatter’s options can be applied by simply toggling them on.

Script Manager

The Perfmatters plugin has a robust Script Manager built-in. This allows you to disable scripts on a per post/page basis or across your entire site with a simple click. All scripts are grouped by their respective plugin and theme so you can easily see which scripts are being used by what. You can also disable scripts by device (desktop or mobile) and logged in or logged out state. This is very powerful and can drastically increase the speed on your WordPress sites (especially your homepage).

Database optimization

Optimizing your WordPress database is important when it comes to keeping your site healthy and running fast. Over time things like this can easily start to add up to hundreds of thousands of rows. We’ve seen this more times than we can count! Just like you would oil and maintain your car, you should also do regular maintenance on your database.

Lazy loading

Lazy loading is essentially delaying the loading of images, videos, or iframes until a user scroll downs the page (they enter the viewport). For posts and pages with a lot of images or videos, this is so important to reduce the number of requests happening right off the bat. In our tests, we’ve seen on average a 33% decrease in load times. It’s faster than the default native lazy loading in WordPress.

Change your WordPress login URL

Sometimes the smallest of changes can make a huge impact. By default, WordPress uses https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ for your login URL. The problem with this is that bots, hackers, etc. all scan for these when looking for vulnerabilities and entry points into your site. We’ve worked with many sites that see 10,000+ failed attempts per day trying to gain access.

By simply changing your WordPress login URL to something more obscure, you can combat this. It’s also great for performance as it decreases bots scraping common areas of your site.

You can change your login URL in the Perfmatters plugin in just a few seconds.

CDN rewrite

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps speed up your WordPress site by storing your assets on different servers (POPs) around the globe and delivering those from cache closer to the visitor. The Perfmatters plugin helps hook up a CDN to your WordPress site.

Host Google Analytics locally

Hosting Google Analytics locally can help speed up your site by reducing extra DNS lookups and resolving the “leverage browser caching” issue from their script.

Ironically Google’s own script throws a warning about caching, but this is because they have their HTTP caching header expiration set really short. When you host it yourself, your own CDN or server’s HTTP caching headers will automatically be applied. In other words, you have full control over the caching of the script.