FlyingPress

FlyingPress is a comprehensive solution for WordPress sites that takes care of all acceleration issues completely. From page caching to image optimization to CDN management and writing critical CSS. In short, FlyingPress allows us to group tasks that we usually distribute in different specialized plugins. But, will our site really “fly”, as the name of this component suggests? Let's find out together.

Introduction

FlyingPress is the most accommodating performance component for those who are unaware of the inner workings of WordPress. Once activated, we don't need to touch anything, since all enhancements are preconfigured from the factory.

Of course, if we want to further optimize our site, we can do tests and eventually decide which configurations speed up the display of online content with the best times. That is up to each one of us.

FlyingPress performs performance optimization tasks, from cache creation to cleaning our database. Therefore, it brings together functionalities typically spread across several third-party components.

page cache

Basically, this option enables caching creation. It is an essential measure to start accelerating any dynamic site, WordPress included.

CSS Settings

In this tab we visualize the options inherent to the optimization of our style sheets.

Minify & Optimize CSS files: Minifying is the process by which the code of a site intelligently compresses without losing its functionality. This option removes unnecessary spaces and comments from the CSS of our website. This option allows our content loads and displays faster.

Generate Critical and Used CSS: This option allows users load unused css asynchronously (that is, the download is activated or not depending on the user's interaction). It is also possible to completely remove unused CSS, although that option has a chance of breaking something in the aesthetics of our website. If we notice something strange, better disable it.

If we use the functionality Generate Critical and Used CSS, we must also enable minification.

JavaScript configuration

Thanks to the JS Minify option, as we have already mentioned for the minification of styles, it allows us to eliminate spaces and unwanted comments from the JavaScript of our website. In this way we achieve reduce execution time general JavaScript and, at the same time, we favor faster charging of the code by browsers. FlyingPress does an excellent job in this area.

JavaScript optimization includes various additional options.

Minify Javascript: Removes unnecessary spaces and comments from the JavaScript code.

Preload Links- When our visitors hover over a link, the Landing Page will automatically and silently preload. It is an interesting resource because the sensation of immediacy that the user receives when entering the link is very remarkable.

Defer JavaScript: force the correct loading order, starting with the html code, followed by the Javascript of our website. Prevents load slowdowns where a visitor sees a blank page for too long (this happens when the JS loads first).

Remember that if our users have to wait for all the scripts to load before they can see the content, it is likely that they will click back and enter a different website than ours (in the jargon it is called bounce, or rebound).

Load Scripts on User Interaction: Scripts will only be downloaded to the visitor's computer or cell phone at the time they click or hover over the item that the script depends on.

Font Settings

There are three possible settings to optimize fonts and preload them on our site:

Optimize Google Fonts: allows us self-host Google fonts to make our website load faster while reducing some requests. It is the required option if our Theme uses Google fonts.

Display Fallback Fonts: As long as the correct fonts are loaded, our site will show “backup fonts”, that is, those present in the visitor's system itself. It is always better to show something than nothing.

Thus, the first thing that will be used for texts is the default font, allowing the visitor to start reading our content. Once the Google font or the one used by our theme is downloaded to the user's PC or cell phone, the appearance of the content will change to adopt that font.

Preload Fonts: in this field we can manually add links to the fonts we want to be loaded beforehand. If we use this option, we are making sure that these fonts are loaded with priority. In general, we recommend not doing this since the previous two options benefit the appearance of the content above the design.

Image Settings

FlyingPress also does an impeccable job of image upload compression and optimization refers. The component minimizes the loading time of bitmaps greatly improving the user experience.

Lazy Load Images: “lazy loading” implies that the images on our site they will load automatically after a user scrolls down (The images that a visitor sees first are loaded with priority, the rest, the ones that are hidden in the beginning, are only loaded when scrolling). Clearly, this helps our users navigate our content faster.

Note the numeric option that allows us to exclude from lazy loading one to five of the first images in the set.

Add Width and Height Attributes: This option automatically adds its pixel size to the image callout, avoiding “cumulative layout changes”. For practical purposes, the spaces where the photos and images of our content will be uploaded are reserved, waiting for the download. Therefore, the appearance of the images will not make the texts "dance" from here to there while the setting is completed.

Preload Critical Images: Allows the priority upload of essential images, such as the logo, the featured image in the notes and any other image that should appear on top of everything in our design.

Disable Emoji: overrides the emoticons that WordPress brings from the factory. Current browsers, Firefox, Edge, Chrome and Safari, support emojis natively. Disabling WordPress saves resources by speeding up our site.

iFrame Configuration

The three visible options should be checked to further speed up our site in the case of using iFrames (especially if we show YouTube videos, Google maps, etc.).

Lazy Load iFrame: lazy loading will be applied to iFrames; same operation and purpose as the deferred charges mentioned earlier in the note.

Use Placeholder image for YouTube iFrames: Instead of loading the frozen video, a “placeholder” or cover image of the video will be displayed (place holder). This image will be replaced by the YouTube iframe only when we click to play the video. This drastically reduces the loading speed of our content that uses YouTube videos.

Self-host YouTube Placeholder: Speed up this scenario even more by hosting YouTube video cover images on our own server (avoiding an external call, at least until the user clicks to play).

CDN setup

In the event that we have contracted any Content Delivery Network service (such as Cloudflare), here we will complete your data. If we are not familiar with this service, we should not touch anything here.

Database Cleanup

This section is a tool to clean our WordPress database. Over time, it becomes loaded with obsolete data, becomes disordered and fragmented. Thanks to FlyingPress we will not need a third-party plugin to optimize the database. Just check the options that interest us and then click the “Save and Optimize Now” button. FlyingPress will do the work for us.

Conclusions

FlyingPress is one of the most modern plugins to optimize the speed and generate cache of our WordPress site. Is really very easy to configure, although its effectiveness is as professional as it is comprehensive.

Compared to its competition, perhaps the most powerful aspect of FlyingPress is a friendly interface. It's so simple that it puts it ahead of today's performance plugins.

Get frequent updates, and best of all, with each new update, the performance of our site improves more and more.

As this is an end-to-end solution, we may be able to uninstall components that we use for specific performance tasks (for example, if we had any to optimize databases). FlyingPress is an all-in-one plugin that makes our lives very easy.

FlyingPress is a paid plugin, and its value is USD60 for the first year and for a single site, renewing the license for USD42

You can see all the FlyingPress plans here.

Wishing that the note has been satisfactory to you, we encourage you to leave your impressions in the comments section. Good luck and thanks for reading.