[00:00:00] **Dustin:** On today's episode, we are going to do another plugin review. This time we're talking about WP optimize right here on your website, engineer podcast, episode number 547.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. And today we've got a quick episode for you talking about how we can optimize our site with of course the plugin WP Optimize. I saw a Twitter thread and probably shouldn't have been scrolling through Twitter yesterday, but I found one that said that this person was using the same WordPress site since 2017 and finally deleted all the unused media files, revisions, plugins, transients, and other old junk. Their site went from 2. 33 gigs down to 500 megabytes. And they shared some of the details in the Twitter thread. And the biggest thing was using the WP Optimize, the free version of the plugin, which is what we're going to talk about today.

And then they also used a plugin. I'll put this in the show notes as well. But it is the Media Cleaner, and there was a free version of that as well. So [00:01:00] those are the two plugins they ran to really optimize their site and get rid of a lot of stuff. I mean, the site's 70 years old and get rid of some of that stuff that is no longer being used.

So I remember using WP Optimize way back in the day when I was obviously optimizing a website or working in a database or whatnot. And so I thought, hey, let's talk about that today because. It is one of the most comprehensive tools on the WordPress repository. When it comes to plugins, as we go through some of the feature sets, you'll be like, wow, this all comes with a free plugin. And yes, it does for sure.

The WP Optimize is a trusted plugin. It's used on more than a million WordPress sites, and it allows owners to boost performance and reduce page load times to improve your site's user experience and their rankings in Google. So of course a faster site's going to be more favorable when it comes to Google.

And it's going to, it's going to make that user experience that, that clicking on the back end, it's going to make that so much easier and so much faster when there's not as much data to kind of parse through on the WordPress side of things.

They state that they are more than a caching plugin. It does do four specific things, and then we'll dive into what each [00:02:00] of those things are. So it caches your site and caching is the process of temporarily storing an HTML version of your site on a server so it can be retrieved more quickly for users.

It compresses images. Large images can really impact page speed load times. So WP Optimized makes it easy to identify and compress images to make your preferred lossy lossless settings in a couple clicks. It makes all those images so much smaller. The third thing that it does is it cleans the database.

It gets rid of the stuff that you don't need in the WordPress database. It cleans, optimizes and speeds up your site and saves your server some resources. And the last way that it helps to speed up your site is it minifies and waste basically what this means. It makes, it takes the CSS and the JavaScript file and compresses them and makes them smaller and makes them faster to transmit across the world.

And then when it's loaded in the browser, it's, it. It's able to be read and saved and all that good stuff. So let's go ahead and dive into how it caches your site. It does have a one page or one click optimization. It basically optimizes to configure itself automatically, but you also have [00:03:00] the ability to cache preload.

So this emulate somebody visiting your site, meaning the cache sites are served right away, speeding up your site from the first visit. Sometimes caching plugins will wait till a user will load the site. And then once it's loaded, then they'll cache it. But WP optimize will go ahead and it'll preload that already.

It'll scrub through your site and it will make. Even if nobody comes to your site, all those pages will already be cached. And it also does a G zip compression. And so this means that it will allow those HTML, CSS, JavaScript files to be saved in the browser. And so then they're not having to load those every single time they come to the site.

And then of course, with your cache settings, you are going to serve cache content to logged in users. You can turn this on or off. This is probably especially important if you are making modifications, you're changing things like you want to make sure that you're not caching your site as a logged in user.

So you can see all your changes real time. You can also exclude content from cache. And those are like WooCommerce settings. You don't want the, my account pages cached. You don't want the carts cached and things like that. [00:04:00] And then you can deliver device specific caches. So you can save a separate cache file to your desktop and mobile devices.

This ensures that the responsive features like on desktop and mobile menus are cached separately and served correctly. You can also cache per role. So if you have different roles on your site, whether that be admin or people that are logged in, like you can do all of that as well.

The second thing that it does is it compresses images so you can choose between maximum space saving or best image quality or somewhere in between. There's a little slider that you can move back and forth.

You can also do WebP conversions. So it's recommended by Google but WebP is a new format kind of like PNG or JPEG. And it can achieve up to a 34 percent smaller size compared to JPEG and up to 26 percent smaller compared to PNG. So it can automatically convert those for you. You can auto compress so you can check a box and every new image you upload will be automatically compressed to your preferred lossy settings.

You can also do bulk compression, which means you can compress every existing image [00:05:00] on your site with the press of a button. And if you've gone too far, you don't like the way that that looks, you can click a button and you can revert the images back to their original with one click.

You can also retain all of the E. X. I. F. Image data. So you can check the box to remain keep all of that there, or you can strip it all out if you'd like.

The third thing that WP optimized does, and it does really well is it cleans and optimizes your database. It cleans up database tables, post revisions, auto draft posts, trashed posts, spam, trashed comments, and more. You can choose what you want to optimize, or it's one click and clean out everything. You can schedule cleanups, or you can set, so you can set it and forget it.

You can choose from daily, weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. You also can set a flexible cleanup schedule, so you may wish to optimize the database tables more frequently.

You can retain a set number of weeks data during the cleanup. So just in case you need to roll back and retrieve something, you can say, oh, I want to keep four weeks worth of data. And then you have that you can back up before you do cleanups. If you delete something, you shouldn't [00:06:00] restore it in a couple clicks with up draft plus.

I guess it was probably important to say that I didn't early on, but updraft plus and WP optimize are made by the same company. So they work really well together. And then the last of the four reasons and the four ways that it will help to optimize your site is you can minify in just one click that minifies html, javascript and css.

You can toggle it on or off. You can do custom minification so you can minify only certain code. And just have a full on experience of looking at that modification again, probably just turning the button on is going to be the best setting for most of us. You can also do asynchronous loading. So this will choose non critical CSS and JavaScript files to load in the background and independently of other resources.

So this is like a analytics or a pixel script. Loading asynchronously, eliminates render blocking, improves page speed. You can also exclude files from it being in this minified file, and you can optimize fonts. So [00:07:00] you can do Font Awesome or Google fonts, inline fonts, inherit CSS or JavaScript asynchronously instead.

So you can optimize all your font things and you can preload assets. So WP Optimize visits each web page on your site. So the code is minified preloaded for real users right from the very first visit. So like I said, this is a plugin on the WordPress repository and you can just see like there's a ton of FAQs.

There are more than let's see. There's more than 2000 five star reviews. More than a million people have installed it and they pump out updates all the time. And so I think if you want a one stop solution, something that's like, Oh, I'm going to set it and forget it. I want to have my sites optimized. This is the plugin for you.

It packs a bunch of punch in this free plugin. It's easy to use. And I think it's one of the best caching optimization technology plugins that are out there to make your WordPress site fast. Now, of course, this also has a, it's not quite an upsell. They don't really try to force it down your throat to pay for the premium version.

There are some pricing and it's [00:08:00] all based on the number of sites that you purchase. For $49 you can have up to two sites on premium. Three to five sites is $199 and that's their business plan. And then for unlimited sites, it's $200 per year to optimize as many sites as you would like.

And some of the premium features are multisite support. It gives you a little bit more flexibility to control you can optimize specific things in the database table or a particular combination of tables on one or more WordPress sites rather than having to optimize the database all itself. You can delete unused and unwanted images so you can remove those orphaned images.

But like I said in from this Twitter thread, you can look at the media cleaner plugin, which is free. And you can do the exact same thing for free again. There'll be a link in the show notes. Just head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/547. And you can find all the links for things that we're talking about here.

Let's see a couple more things that you could get. If you pay for the premium version, you can, you can get sophisticated scheduling. So you can set some optimizations for your [00:09:00] scheduling. There's WPCLI support, so you can do a lot of optimization via the command line If if that's something that you're interested in. They also have lazy loading so you can load only the images and part of your web page when it's visible to the user. So things can be very loaded very quickly.

Optimization preview will give the users or you as the website owner, the ability to preview select and remove data and records available for the optimization of the database. So you can set up your fields and then you can click go and then it will give you a preview of everything that it's going to remove first, which is pretty handy.

And then the last thing, of course, is premium support. One caching is one of the most complex things when you talked about a website and so premium support offers you a peace of mind that there's someone to talk to quickly if you need any technical answers or help configuring the optimizations of the plugin.

And I would recommend if you are a plugin developer or you're just a WordPress enthusiast using the WordPress repository, go and look at just the expansive information that is on this page, just highlighting the details of this [00:10:00] plugin, the free version. It has a bunch of FAQs.

[00:10:02] **Dustin:** It has a ton of pictures so you can see exactly how things work and how things can be optimiZed.

So it's not quite spring yet, but it's probably always a good time to keep in the back of our mind. Oh, we should be cleaning, we should be optimizing, we should be doing some of these things for our WordPress sites. And so that's why I wanted to point that out and share that with you today.

If you have any plugin recommendations, if you want something that you want to be discussed, or if you are a developer of a plugin, I would love to have you on and talk about your plugin and how it works.

You can reach out to me, Dustin@YourWebsiteEngineer.com. And that's what I wanted to share with you today.

Next week, I'm going to be sharing an interview with somebody from the WordPress community that is doing some really interesting things in WordPress, and I'm excited to share that with you.

But you have to stay tuned for next week, and that's episode number 548. Until then, take care, and we'll talk again soon. Bye bye. For more great WordPress information, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer. com