The search for a cache plugin in WordPress is endless. I spent years looking for a perfect plugin, until finally I found one that really improved the loading speed in an incomparable way. Today I present the Pagespeed Ninja!
For many years I used the WP-Rocket that I thought was perfect, but unfortunately it was paid, I let its license expire, which further elevated its renewal. I tried to look for free ways until I found the hummingbird.
How do I use Runcloud, I also had access to a server-level cache plugin alongside Redis. Of course, that wasn't enough, I needed a JS and CSS optimizer and other custom optimizations.
Getting a high score on the desktop is easy, but on mobile it is impossible, especially when you use ADS ads. I never got a score higher than 50 on mobile because of the ads. Which made me angry!
I found Pagespeed Ninja
My friend told me about the PageSpeed Ninja plugin, when searching for it on WordPress, I found an unknown plugin with only 30,000 activations and without updating for 7 months. I didn't put much faith in it, but I decided to activate it and test it.
I realized that the plugin support is still active, browsing the forum I saw the webmaster saying that due to the Pagespeed API change, the speed results no longer appeared in the plugin, but the plugin was normal.
After some configuration tests, I realized that the plugin worked perfectly without breaking my site and made it super fast, almost instant. Even with ads, on the desktop he took 99 and on mobile about 70, depending on the ads.
It was the first time that I saw the first Pagespeed comic already showing the entire page, see:
It's no use, as long as there are ads, you won't be able to get a 100 on mobile and the time until it becomes interactive will be high, but that doesn't affect anything, the page loads instantly. I tested the plugin on my 3 sites, using the Generatepress theme.
To obtain a satisfactory result like this, you need to test, activate and deactivate functions, check that there are no conflicting plugins and so on. Remembering that I am also using CloudFlare, a must for all sites.
I always hated Cloudflare, until I finally tested it (lol). I also use CDN for images and JS from Jetpack and pure Nginx on Runcloud. But don't worry, my friend uses shared hosting and got a better score than mine using such a plugin.
The Pagespeed Ninja functions
This was the first cache plugin that I was able to activate all functions without breaking my site:
If the Google API still works, Pagespeed annotations would appear in these circles, the plugin creator states that he is looking for a solution for you to see your speed notes in the wordpress plugin itself.
Note that it separates desktop optimization from mobile. In the advanced settings, you will find 3 distribution methods: direct, php or Apache mod_rewrite + mod_headers. In this option, I chose Direct, since I use direct server optimization.
In Minify CSS and JS, I selected in only in the option Merge Embedded styles. I disabled the options Keep Extra Link tag attributes and Keep extra style attributes. I also disabled the removal of default attributes and conditions for IE.
I don't direct you to do the same things, but do your own tests instead of copying my settings. It all depends on your theme and your wishes, but I strongly recommend testing this plugin.
Ready to speed up your site?
Those who are fanatical about scores on PageSpeed, Gmetrix, and Pingdom Tools will be proud to see scores like this:
Before the plugin my site weighed 2.0mb and pulled 120 requests. Of course, I also did my part and removed some unnecessary things and made changes until I got that perfect grade, but I am proud to achieve this using Adsense.
Do you believe that even my Adsense earnings have gone up? Before this optimization I generated about 5 dollars a day, now it is rising to 10 dollars, even if I remove the ad that appears at the top of the article.
I even removed AMP from my sites, which took longer to load. With AMP I had about 40 on mobile, but the loading time was slower, even before using the Pagespeed Ninja plugin.
With this experience, I learned that there are unknown plugins that are superior to the famous ones. Who still uses Yoast instead of Rank Math? Sometimes people pay more and receive less by following the herd or the popular choice.
I hope you enjoyed this article, if you liked it, share it and leave your comments. Focus on your content, make your site fast, the reward soon comes. Is that you? tested the plugin? Leave your experience with us.