Perfmatters

Perfmatters WordPress Plugin

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(similar to Advanced Database Cleaner).

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. This is very powerful and can drastically increase the speed on your WordPress sites (especially your homepage).

A few examples of what this can be used for:

• The popular Contact Form 7 plugin loads itself on every page and post. You can easily disable it everywhere with one click and enable only on your contact page.
• Social media sharing plugins should only be loaded on your posts. You can easily disable it everywhere and load only on post types, or even custom post types.

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. Just like you would oil and maintain your car, you should also do regular maintenance on your database.

The Perfmatters plugin lets you easily clean up and delete old and unused data. Here are just a few ways:

• Delete revisions (posts, pages, and custom post types).
• Delete old auto-drafts that are saved when you’re editing content.
• Delete WordPress spam comments in one fell swoop.
• Clean up your trash from comments and posts.
• Delete expired transients and keep your wp_options table clean.
• Optimize your database tables to reclaim unused space.

You can also save your settings to come back later or schedule automatic database optimization on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is great for those of you with clients or too busy to keep up with regular maintenance.

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. With implementing Lazy Loading feature you reach on average a 33% decrease in load times.

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

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.
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.
The Perfmatters Google Analytics feature includes:

• Change the tracking code position between the header or footer of your site.
• Disable display features. This gets rid of a second HTTP request.
• Anonymize your IP for data privacy and GDPR purposes.
• Choose whether or not to track logged in admins.
• Adjust your site’s bounce rate to better evaluate the quality of your traffic.
• Integration with MonsterInsights for additional analytics features while still taking advantage of a locally hosted script.

Add code to header, body, footer

There are times when you might need to add custom code to your WordPress site’s header (head), body, or footer. With the Perfmatters plugin, you can easily include custom code where you need it.

• Print out code directly on the front end. This could include inline CSS inside <style> tags or inline JS inside <script> tags.
• You can load a JS or CSS file.
• Code added to the header will print in the <head> </head> section on your site.
• Code added to the body will print below the opening <body> tag on your site.
• Code added to the footer will print above the closing </body> tag on your site

DNS prefetch and preconnect

DNS prefetch and preconnect are both rel attributes that can help speed up the loading of scripts and resources on your WordPress site. You can easily add these attributes with the Perfmatters plugin.

• DNS prefetch allows you to resolve domain names (perform a DNS lookup in the background) before a user clicks on a link, which in turn can help improve performance.
• Preconnect allows the browser to set up early connections before an HTTP request, eliminating round-trip latency and saving time for users.
• Both are supported by all major browsers.
• Google recommends adding these when appropriate.