PageSpeed Ninja

Description

PageSpeed Ninja is the ultimate WordPress performance plugin, dedicated to improving the loading speed of your website on both desktop and mobile platforms. This plugin effortlessly addresses Google PageSpeed Insights issues and significantly improves Core Web Vitals — all with a single click.

This tool offers a range of features designed to optimize your website’s speed:

• Enabling Compression: Implement Gzip and Brotli compression for faster load times.
• Resolve Render-Blocking Issues: Address render-blocking CSS and JavaScript issues to streamline loading.
• Enhancing Critical Rendering Path: Automatically generate critical CSS for above-the-fold content to improve the critical rendering path.
• Minification: Reduce load size by minifying HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
• Resource Bundling: Combine and inline resources for JavaScript and CSS to reduce server requests.
• Deferred Loading: Prioritize content rendering by deferring CSS and JavaScript loading.
• Image Optimization: Improve loading speed with optimized image formats.
• Efficient Image Formats: Convert images to WebP format for faster performance.
• Lazy Loading: Optimize initial load with image lazy loading and optional low-quality placeholders.
• Optimized Google Fonts: Streamline Google Fonts loading for quicker rendering.
• Cache Leveraging: Utilize browser and server-side caching for improved performance.
• Benefit from 10+ years of experience optimizing 200,000+ mobile-friendly websites to offer even more enhancements, including next-generation image formats, caching, and a suite of front-end and back-end performance improvements.

This plugin is your go-to solution for reducing load times, improving SERP optimization, and boosting overall website speed, making it an essential tool for performance optimization and SEO.

Why Choose PageSpeed Ninja?

Are you looking to improve your website’s performance and Google search rankings? PageSpeed Ninja excels in core web vitals and SEO optimization. For over a decade, we’ve been at the forefront of mobile web optimization. You might be familiar with one of our popular projects, Lazy Load XT on GitHub. PageSpeed Ninja for WordPress represents our extensive expertise gained from optimizing the performance of over 200,000 websites on mobile devices. We believe you won’t find a similar, user-friendly, all-in-one solution for boosting the performance your website.

Benefit from our suite of unique features meticulously designed to turbocharge your site’s loading speed. From innovative critical CSS generation for above-the-fold content to implementation of tagged page caching, we ensure lightning-fast load times that improve critical performance metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and more.

Your feedback matters! Share your questions, insights, and suggestions as we continue to prioritize website usability and performance improvements.

Before You Install

Our statistics indicate that the plugin improves the speed of 4 out of 5 websites. However, certain theme and plugin combinations, especially those related to caching and optimization, may lead to compatibility issues. Therefore, our plugin might not suit every website. To preview how PageSpeed Ninja could benefit your site, we’ve developed a simple tool that allows you to test it before installing it. We highly recommend that you visit PageSpeed.Ninja and run a test of your website beforehand. Please note: To accurately test your site on PageSpeed.Ninja, it’s crucial to temporarily disable any optimizing plugins. This test requires raw data to apply its own optimization.

Installation

1. Upload the plugin files to the /wp-content/plugins/psn-pagespeed-ninja directory, or install the plugin directly from the WordPress plugins screen. We highly recommend creating a backup of your site beforehand, just as you would before installing any new plugin.
2. Activate the plugin through the “Plugins” screen in the WordPress dashboard.
3. Select the optimization preset in the post-install pop-up window and click Save.
4. After installing the plugin, navigate to PageSpeed Ninja and adjust the optimization levels suggested by Google’s PageSpeed Insights (note that all optimizations are disabled by default). The plugin will then optimize your images, JS and CSS files, and update .htaccess files to fix the issues identified by Google PageSpeed Insights.

Features

Presets

In the ever-evolving realm of website optimization, time is crucial. People who own, design, or develop websites are constantly looking gor efficient ways to boost performance without getting bogged down in tweaking every single setting. This is precisely where the “Presets” feature of the PageSpeed Ninja plugin for WordPress comes in.

PageSpeed Ninja offers five different presets, each tailored to specific optimization needs:
– Optimal Preset suitable for the majority of websites,
– Safe Preset prioritizes compatibility,
– Compact Preset focuses on saving disk space,
– Ultra Preset aims for maximum optimization,
– and Experimental Preset reserved for testing new, possibly less stable features.

PageSpeed Ninja Settings Groups

PageSpeed Ninja organizes its settings into groups aligned with the Google PageSpeed Insight categories (such as “Initial server response time was short”, Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy”, etc.). Using the data from the Google PageSpeed Insight speed analysis, the plugin categorizes the settings groups into three distinct classes: Should Fix, Consider Fixing, and Passed.

Within the General settings, users can easily enable or disable each settings group (specific settings depend on the preset selected), and the Advanced settings page offers the flexibility to fine-tune all settings according to specific preferences.

Each switch in the settings interface is color-coded to reflect its impact on your website’s PageSpeed Insights score:
– Green: Improves the score.
– Orange: Has minimal effect on the score.
– Red: Negatively affects the score.

Note that adjusting certain settings may cause related switches to change color due to their interrelated effects on performance.

Initial Server Response Time was Short

The “Initial server response time was short” feature within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin optimizes server responses by implementing efficient caching mechanisms. By using advanced page caching strategies, it reduces the server’s response time to incoming requests. This optimization directly translates into faster load times for visitors, contributing to an improved user experience and potentially boosting search engine rankings due to better site performance metrics.

Serve Static Assets with an Efficient Cache Policy

The “Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy” feature of the PageSpeed Ninja plugin optimizes website performance by implementing an effective caching strategy for static resources. This feature refines the cache policy to improve browser caching for elements such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. It maximizes caching efficiency by instructing the browser on the optimal duration to retain these assets, reducing server requests and accelerating page load times for returning visitors. By managing caching directives, it ensures that static resources remain stored in the user’s browser cache for an extended period of time, minimizing the need for frequent re-downloads, and subsequently improving overall site speed and performance.

Enable Text Compression

The “Enable text compression” setting in the PageSpeed Ninja plugin optimizes website performance by using two powerful compression techniques: Gzip and Brotli compression. Gzip compression, a widely supported method, reduces the size of text-based files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by compressing them before transmission, thereby speeding up website load times. Brotli compression, a newer and more efficient algorithm, further reduces file sizes and improves performance for modern browsers that support this advanced compression method. Enabling these settings ensures that textual content on the website is efficiently compressed, increasing overall speed and improving the user experience.

Preconnect to Required Origins

The “Preconnect to required origins” feature in the PageSpeed Ninja plugin optimizes website performance by initiating early connections to third-party origins, reducing latency and improving load times. Using DNS prefetching, it proactively resolves domain names for faster connections. By pre-establishing connections to essential domains such as CDNs or external APIs, it reduces handshake time, accelerating resource retrieval, and improving overall page speed and user experience.

Preload Key Requests

The “Preload key requests” setting within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin focuses on optimizing website load times by proactively preloading critical resources. This feature strategically identifies and preloads essential assets, such as fonts, scripts, or CSS files that are required for the initial page rendering process. By anticipating and fetching these key requests ahead of time, it significantly improves page speed and enhances the user experience. This setting harnesses the power of preload techniques to ensure vital elements are swiftly available, ultimately optimizing overall website performance.

Minify CSS

The “Minify CSS” settings within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin offer a robust set of tools designed to boost website performance by minimizing CSS files. These settings use advanced CSS minification techniques by using a CSS minifier to compress and optimize CSS resources. By reducing CSS size through meticulous compression, the plugin significantly improves page load times, ensuring efficient content delivery while reducing bandwidth usage. Through its comprehensive approach to CSS size reduction and use of cutting-edge CSS compression methods, the “Minify CSS” settings efficiently reduce file sizes and improve overall website speed, in line with the core goals of CSS resource optimization.

Minify JavaScript

The “Minify JavaScript” setting in the PageSpeed Ninja plugin provides powerful tools to optimize website performance by reducing JavaScript file sizes. This feature uses advanced JavaScript minification techniques, employing a JavaScript minifier to compress and condense code, improving load times and overall site speed. By enabling JS compression, Minify JavaScript helps to reduce JavaScript size, optimize script delivery and boost web page efficiency through effective Minify JS strategies.

Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

The “Eliminate render-blocking resources” feature of the PageSpeed Ninja plugin significantly improves page loading speed by focusing on critical aspects of optimization. This feature uses various strategies such as Above-the-fold Critical CSS and Non-blocking JavaScripts to streamline the critical path for fast rendering of essential content. The plugin provides options to inline critical CSS and defer (asynchronously lazy load) non-essential CSS for improved performance. In addition, the plugin manages JavaScript by deferring or asynchronously loading scripts to improve the critical rendering path for a smoother and faster user experience.

Ensure Text Remains Visible During Webfont Load

The “Ensure text remains visible during webfont load” feature within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin prioritizes the visibility of text while web fonts are loading. It uses the “swap” mode for web fonts to ensure that a fallback font is displayed immediately, preventing a flash of invisible text (FOIT) or a flash of unstyled text (FOUT). Additionally, it optimizes the loading of Google Fonts, ensuring that content remains visible during the font-loading process. This optimization significantly improves the user experience and page performance.

Avoids Enormous Network Payloads

The “Avoids enormous network payloads” setting within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin includes several optimization techniques aimed at reducing excessive data transfer. It includes features such as CSS optimization, minifying HTML, bundling/merging CSS and JavaScript files, async script loading, HTML minification, and optimizing emoji loading. Together, these settings work to reduce file sizes, streamline resource delivery, and improve page loading speed by minimizing unnecessary network payloads, ensuring a more efficient and faster browsing experience for users.

Efficiently Encode Images

The “Efficiently encode images” settings within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin provide a comprehensive suite of image optimization tools. This feature allows users to fine-tune the optimization process by adjusting JPEG, WebP, and AVIF qualities to ensure efficient compression without compromising image integrity. With its range of customizable settings, it allows users to optimize and compress images to varying degrees, serving as a powerful picture optimizer. From fine-tuning JPEG compression to maximizing WebP quality, this tool serves as a robust image optimization resource, ensuring that web pages load quickly without compromising visual content quality.

Serve Images in Next-Gen Formats

The “Serve images in next-gen formats” feature, a core component of the PageSpeed Ninja plugin, is a key tool for optimizing website images. This feature facilitates the conversion of images into modern formats such as WebP, a next-gen image format known for its superior compression and quality attributes. This setting acts as an image converter, seamlessly converting existing image files into the WebP format, thereby improving website loading speed and performance. By leveraging the capabilities of WebP, this image conversion setting ensures optimal image delivery, promoting a more efficient and faster browsing experience for site visitors.

Defer Offscreen Images

The “Defer offscreen images” feature within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin offers various optimizations aimed at improving page load times by implementing lazy loading techniques. This feature delays the loading of images, videos, and iframes that are not immediately visible on the user’s screen, using image lazyload methods to prioritize content above the fold. The plugin allows users to choose from two types of Low-Quality Image Placeholders (LQIPs): gradient placeholders and blurred low-quality placeholders. These placeholders are displayed in place of the actual images, providing a smoother initial load while the full-quality images load in the background, improving overall page speed and user experience.

Image Elements Have Explicit Width and Height

The “Image elements have explicit width and height” setting in the PageSpeed Ninja plugin focuses on optimizing the rendering of web pages by ensuring that all images have explicit width and height attributes. This optimization strategy aims to prevent layout shifts during page loading by specifying the exact dimensions for each image element and ensures that browsers pre-allocate space for images based on the provided dimensions, eliminating the need for recalculations when images load and significantly improving the user experience by minimizing visual disruptions caused by sudden layout changes.

JavaScript Execution Time

The “JavaScript execution time” setting in the PageSpeed Ninja plugin provides robust control over optimizing JavaScript to improve site performance. It enables features like deferring critical JS to prioritize vital scripts for faster loading, optimizing integrations with platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to streamline their scripts’ loading mechanisms, and delaying the loading of all asynchronous JavaScripts to prevent potential bottlenecks. Additionally, it allows for the selective delay of loading of specific JavaScripts in Advanced settings, providing precise management of resource loading for improved overall website speed and efficiency.

Avoids an Excessive DOM Size

The “Avoids an excessive DOM size” setting within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin focuses on optimizing webpage performance by reducing the Document Object Model (DOM) size. Currently, this is accomplished by eliminating embedded plugins such as Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight. This process result in faster page rendering and a better user experience. In additional, ongoing development may introduce further optimization techniques to trim excess DOM elements and improve overall website speed and efficiency.

Has a Meta Viewport Tag with width or initial-scale

The “Has a meta viewport tag with width or initial-scale” feature within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin optimizes web pages by ensuring that they contain an important meta viewport tag. This tag is crucial for improving mobile responsiveness and overall user experience. Including this tag allows web content to properly scale and adapt to different devices and screen sizes, ultimately optimizing the page for seamless viewing across a range of devices.

Advanced Settings

The Advanced Settings page within the PageSpeed Ninja plugin serves as a central hub for users seeking more control over their website optimization. This feature-rich section not only allows users to fine-tune settings according to their preferences but also facilitates efficient cache management and provides troubleshooting capabilities. With the ability to delve into intricate configurations, users can adjust specific parameters to tailor the plugin’s performance optimization precisely to their website’s requirements. This comprehensive suite of advanced options exemplifies the plugin’s commitment to providing users with granular control over their website’s speed optimization while ensuring effortless cache management.

Free License Key

Starting from November 2023, PageSpeed Ninja requires a free license key for connectivity to our servers. This important update promises improved server load balancing, a critical measure to prevent resource exhaustion and ensure uninterrupted performance. You can get your free license key by visiting https://pagespeed.ninja/download/.

PageSpeed Ninja Pro

PageSpeed Ninja Pro is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to optimize website performance through a range of advanced features. It drastically reduces load times with its fast advanced page caching and multithreading background optimization, image optimization features that include properly sizing images and AVIF format support. The plugin excels in efficient CLI asset optimization through minification tools such as UglifyJS for JavaScripts, CSSO for stylesheets, JPEGOptim/OptiPNG/GIFsicle for images, and many others, ensuring reduced load times. Its DNS Prefetch and Preload Assistants fine-tune site responsiveness. Notably, it allows users to self-host and optimize external resources like Google Analytics and offers robust backup/restore capabilities, culminating in a comprehensive solution for turbocharging website performance.

Get PRO with PageSpeed.Ninja

Uninstallation

When you delete the plugin, it will automatically revert all settings on your site to the original state as they were before this plugin was installed. During this process, the “/s” directory containing optimized files will be removed any changes made to “.htaccess” files will be undone. Please note that uninstalling the plugin will remove all data associated with the plugin, including settings and logs.

Feedback, Bug Reports, and Logging Possible Issues

We value your input! If you have any questions, suggestions, or encounter issues related to site speed optimization, we encourage you to contact us at hello@pagespeed.ninja. Whether you’re a user, developer, or tester, your feedback is essential to improving our services.

To facilitate troubleshooting and improvements, PageSpeed Ninja offers error logging capabilities. You can enable this feature in the Advanced tab of the PageSpeed Ninja settings. If you encounter any problems, you can help us in resolving them by providing us with the relevant error log file. This error log can be found in wp-content/plugins/psn-pagespeed-ninja/includes/error_log.php (note: the generated error log is a text file, not a PHP file). If you encounter any issues or anomalies, please consider sending us this error log file for further analysis and resolution. Your assistance will help us improve your experience with PageSpeed Ninja.