Maybe your website looks great. Maybe you’ve just started to post regularly and see the growing trend of your website traffic, or you’ve already got the top positioning on search engines. You see the visitors on your website but you feel that they disappear too quickly without filling up your form or requesting a quote. Maybe it is not just a feeling and your website loads slowly, which is a major contributing factor to page abandonment.
According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Maybe you are aware of it and you’ve already installed the caching plugin such as W3TC or WP Super Cache and enabled CDN (Content Delivery Network). Maybe you’ve even become the most frequent user of GTMetrix.com or tools.pingdom.com and, after trying millions of plugins such as Autoptimize or JCH Optimize there is no significant change or you end up with a broken website. And maybe you have been told that if you install a caching plugin and optimize images, you’ll be all set and there is simply no other way to make it load faster.
The truth is you can make your website load faster than you can imagine. All you need to install is just one plugin: WP Accelerator. It uses a completely different approach than caching plugins: instead of speeding up the main HTML page, it drastically reduces network round trips that are required to serve the assets such as CSS/JS files or images. If it sounds good to you, you should know the greatest thing: it makes your website blazing fast on a mobile and it speeds up all the plugins including the WooCommerce! You may keep your caching plugin installed because it can speed up your website along with any caching plugin installed such as W3TC, WP Super Cache, Comet Cache or WP Rocket.
How WP Accelerator compares to others
Remember, WP Accelerator works great with any caching plugin such as W3TC or WP Super Cache.
WP Accelerator features
This plugin leverages a wide variety of advanced techniques to make your website load faster.
You may start with enabling the image inlining – it can inject all the small images directly into the HTML page source code or into the referenced CSS files. If you’d like to squeeze out the maximum from your plugins, then you may try the feature called eXtreme image acceleration which can serve all images on page with ONE single HTTP response (images are downloaded using only one single file) – HTTP/2 or JavaScript is NOT required.
If you’ve ever tried some CSS/JS concatenation/minification plugin or the built-in concatenation feature of some caching plugins on a complex website, you’ve probably ended up with a completely broken layout, menus or widgets. You highly likely told yourself that you would never-ever enable this feature again. Maybe it is time to change your decision and give it a second chance: WP Accelerator plugin does not perform a simple concatenation of CSS or JS files and it keeps things working.
The built-in CSS parser fixes all syntax errors before combining the CSS files and finally creates an all-in-one CSS file which also includes CSS files referenced with the @import at-rule. It ensures that your website stays looking 100% the same way as before.
If you are similarly sceptical about concatenating the JS files, then you should know that WP Accelerator plugin comes with a highly intelligent algorithm which correctly combines all JS files and keeps your website 100% working as before. Unlike other plugins, it does not require you to reorganize or exclude any JS files – it works always out of the box and this is guaranteed by the authors!
Also, the CSS or JS files don’t need to be referenced either by wp_enqueue_style() or wp_enqueue_script() functions – WP Accelerator can do all its magic with CSS/JS/images regardless of your theme being coded well or not!
Another feature of WP Accelerator that no other plugin comes with, is its ability to move large internal CSS styles out of the HTML source code into the external file while keeping the CSS selector priorities. It allows to greatly improve the repeat view especially on mobile if you are using some plugins that produce large internal styles in the HTML source code such as the famous Visual Composer plugin.
On top of that, WP Accelerator can serve highly and permanently compressed CSS/JS files which reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%. It is 5x more efficient than minification and it requires 0% extra server load.
While the reduction of the network round trips greatly helps on both desktop and mobile, it is always essential to use CDN (Content Delivery Network) especially if you are on a host that serves static files slowly or if you target a global market. In the WP Accelerator plugin you may setup up to 3 custom CDNs but it does not stop there!
It can also utilize public CDNs (see the third screenshot of the configuration screen) which serve common files such as those that come with jQuery or Font Awesome. If the plugin recognizes a common file on your website, it serves it by using either Google CDN or jsDelivr.com. It does not only speed up because these CDNs are very fast and their data centers are often closer to visitors, but there is also a high chance these files have been already cached by the browser after visiting some other website, so in fact no download of such a file is performed. Awesome, when it comes to mobile.
Maintenance mode
Everyone knows time is priceless – many people like to install new plugins right on their live websites without testing them first, and we all know how often it leads to a complete website restoration from backup. With WP Accelerator you are safe to go straight forward: there are no changes to your live website files and you may enable the plugin only for selected IPs. As soon as you are sure everything is properly configured, you may disable the maintenance mode and go online. Easy & safe.
Testing the Results
On the WP Accelerator website you may see a plenty of before/after comparisons. Let’s take a look at one created with GTMetrix service:
As you can see the WP Accelerator plugin was able to reduce the network round trips (HTTP requests) from 226 to 93 and the Page Loading Time from 9.2 to 4.1 which means this website is now more than 2x faster. In general, the more HTTP requests your website requires (the more complex your website is), the better results you may expect.
Pricing
WP Accelerator is available in two packages. The first one is with a copyright notice; a one-site license that costs 55 EUR, the second one is without a copyright notice (recommended); a one-site license that costs 65 EUR.
Both licenses can be used on 1 Live and 2 Staging/Dev websites (there are quantity discounts available up to 40%) and they come with free updates within purchased series of the plugin and a 30-day refund policy. There is an installation service available that helps you to install and configure the plugin, fine-tune the PHP configuration or help with database optimization (you will receive a before/after comparison to see how much faster the plugin makes your website load).
Final thoughts
Finally, I am happy to say there are no issues with this plugin on a complex website – this is awesome news and one of the biggest advantages of this plugin. While the plugin will not help you much if your VPS or host suffer from lack of memory or performance, it is good to point out there is finally a plugin that can effectively and reliably fight with the increased number of HTTP requests. An issue, that is becoming the biggest downfall of complex websites when it comes to page loading time!
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