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WP Speed of Light Review: Best Plugin Optimize Your WordPress Website

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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If you’re running a WordPress website, you should always be on the lookout for ways to speed up your site. But page speed optimization can be hard to grasp, especially if you’re not a powerful WordPress user. To help fix that, WP Speed of Light is a freemium WordPress plugin that aims to make it simpler and easier to speed up your WordPress site. Essentially, it aims to be an all-in-one solution for WordPress performance. In our WP Speed of Light review, we’ll share just exactly what goes into making WP Speed of Light an all-in-one solution. Then, we’ll put it through a test on a live website and see how much it can improve page load times.

WP Speed of Light

WP Speed of Light

As the name says it all, WP Speed of Light is a quality performance plugin. If you are a beginner, this is the ideal plugin, to begin with. It provides an all-in-one solution to optimize your website by trying to make it simple. Advanced user detailed options such as database cleanup system, htaccess optimization is one of WP Speed of Light’s few factors that makes it appealing. It is pretty obvious that it will help you with loading times much faster.

You can always use the completely free WP Speed of Light plugin listed at WordPress.org. However, if you want the premium features, you have two options:

  • Pro Version + 6 Months of Support & Updates – $34 – gives you 1 GB image compression in addition to limited support/updates
  • Pro Version + 1 Year of Support & Updates – $44 – gives you 3 GB image compression in addition to the extra support/update period

WP Speed of Light Key Features

The free version of the plugin handles:

  • Page caching
  • Selective or global cache by device
  • File grouping
  • GZIP compression
  • Remove query strings (an annoying warning on most people’s Google Pagespeed Insights score)
  • Browser cache (another common Google Page Speed problem)
  • Minification – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  • Database optimization – post revisions, spam comments, transients, etc.
  • CDN integration
  • In-dashboard performance reports, both for page load times and database queries

And if you upgrade to the Pro version, you’ll also get:

  • Image compression – either 1 GB or 3 GB of usage
  • Google Fonts optimization (group all fonts as a single file)
  • Cache preloading – ensures that the first visitor to your page after a cache cleanup doesn’t have to wait for the cache to generate
  • Visual file exclusion for minification and grouping (helpful if one of those two features is causing an issue with a file)
  • DNS preloading – reduces the time it takes for DNS resolutions from external domains
  • Automatic database cleanup – schedule the cleanup rather than doing it manually like the free version offers.
  • More advanced cache exclusion rules, including wildcard and user role exclusions

Pros

  • User-friendly interface
  • Integrates with CDN
  • Speed tests available for testing 

Cons

  • The lazy load feature is not available on the free version. 
  • Only English and French are available language

WP Speed of Light Installation & Setup

Once you install and activate the plugin(s), WP Speed of Light gives you this nice dashboard with an overview of your site’s performance:

WP Speed of Light - dashboard

Beyond the dashboard, you also get 6 different menu areas to further configure/utilize the plugin:

Speed Analysis: Page Speed And Database Query Tests

In the Speed analysis area, you can:

  • Run page load time tests using the WebPageTest API
  • Monitor database queries for specific pages
WP Speed of Light - url to analyse

In general, this area is more about helping you monitor your site’s performance than actively improving your site’s performance.

Speed Optimization: Where You Speed Things Up

The Speed optimization area is where you’ll actually make the tweaks to speed up your site. In the Speed Optimization tab, you can configure the cache settings for your site: 

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WP Speed of Light - speed optimization

In the Minify & Group Resources tab, you can configure the various minification settings and/or group different resources together:

WP Speed of Light - minify and group resources

And in the Advanced Optimization tab, you can configure cache preloading and DNS pre-fetching

WP Speed of Light - advanced optimization

Database Cleanup: Optimize Your Database

In the Database cleanup tab, you can optimize your entire database or just deal with specific tables. And you can also create an automatic schedule if desired:

WP Speed of Light - wordpress database cleanup

CDN integration: Exactly What You’d Expect!

The CDN integration tab helps you connect to an external CDN service. We are not using a CDN on the test site, so we weren’t able to personally test this feature. But based on our experience with the rest of the plugin, we are going to assume it works as described:

WP Speed of Light - cache cleanup

Configuration: Other Minor Settings

Finally, the Configuration area helps you configure some other settings like:

  • User roles to exclude from optimization settings
  • WebPageTest API key
General settings

And that’s pretty much all there is to it! Overall, WP Speed of Light is pretty simple to use.

WP Speed of Light Performance Test: What The Data Says

Here’s where we find out if that lengthy feature list above actually translates into a noticeably quicker website.

To test that, we’re going to run a little before/after the test. We set up a test site on the SiteGround GrowBig plan. Here are some details on my website:

  • Using an Elementor landing page template with Elementor Canvas (this essentially removes my theme from the equation)
  • Is ~1MB and has 57 external requests

Beyond WP Speed of Light, we haven’t done a single thing to improve the performance of the site.

From here, we’ll run two sets of tests:

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  • GTmetrix – shows how quickly my site loads for a single visit.
  • Load Impact – shows how quickly my site loads for 25 visitors spread over 5 minutes.

Let’s see how it goes!

Before: Test Site Loaded In ~1.8 Seconds

Ok, here’s how the test site did before installing and configuring WP Speed of Light.

Testing from GTmetrix’s Vancouver, Canada server, the test site loaded in 1.8 seconds:

Siteground test site

That’s definitely not horrible for an unoptimized site (SiteGround is pretty good!), but it’s also nothing to phone home about.

To see how the unoptimized site performed under some load, we also ran it through Load Impact:

vu load time

The blue line represents the number of active users, while the green line represents how long the page took to load. You can see that, with the exception of a spike at the beginning, the test site was actually pretty consistent for every subsequent visit, with load times hovering around 1.2 seconds.

After: Page Load Times Reduced By 50%+

Ok, if you recall from the first test a second ago. The unoptimized version of the site:

  • Loaded in 1.8 seconds
  • Was a little bit over 1MB
  • Had 57 requests
  • Scored 90% in PageSpeed
  • Scored 78% in YSlow

After optimizing my site with WP Speed of Light, those numbers improved across the board:

  • Load time cut in half to 0.9 seconds
  • Page size cut to 945 KB
  • Requests knocked down to 28
  • PageSpeed Score up to 100%
  • YSlow score up to 89%
WP Speed of Light - siteground after

Not bad for a couple of mouse clicks!

As with the previous test, we also put the optimized site through Load Impact. With the exception of a weird spike in the middle (which we think is WP Speed of Light’s fault), the test site’s page load times dropped to 450ms for each virtual user, which is a little over 50% reduction:

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vu load time after

Verdict

There are a ton of WordPress optimization plugins, so we don’t have the data to definitively compare WP Speed of Light to other solutions. But we can definitively say that WP Speed of Light will probably speed your website up a good deal. At least for the test website, we saw page load times decrease by 50%+. So, if you want to see how it can speed up your site, get WP Speed of Light, read this review and see for yourself. 

Try WP Speed of Light

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.