The two developers (and brothers) who created Perfmatters coincided with a real problem in mind: slow sites suffer from a high bounce rate, and have fewer conversions. Therefore, the Perfmatters plugin (for “performance matters“, or “performance is important”) was born to speed up our WordPress site with many different measures. In this note, its most relevant benefits.
looking for simplicity
The Perfmatters component was created to be easy and practical. For starters, let's forget about editing functions.php. And yes, the optimizations are of the on/off type, that is to say that just one click to activate them (or disable them).
Why is this plugin so good? Basically, allows us to disable all those scripts that might not have use. Removing scripts that are loaded on your site without providing any functionality is a great way to speed up WordPress.
For example, we know that by default emojis are loaded on every Page/Post on our site. But if we don't use emojis, why would we want such a script taking up resources and slowing down the loading of the site? Well, we deactivate it, and so on we gain a reduction of the total number of HTTP requests What does our website do to the hosting server? Therefore, smaller page size, and faster.
Clean the database
Yes, this plugin could not claim to be a comprehensive solution if it lacked a tool to optimize our database. Perfmatters cleans review tables, auto drafts, spam comments and other transient data taking up space. Remember that any orphaned piece of information slows down our site. Thanks to Perfmatters, we can easily clean this up and even set limits to prevent it from happening again. The component guarantees us a database that is always fast and agile.
Immediacy on/off
As we can see in the screenshot above, many Perfmatters options are activated with a click. In addition, it lets us decide where to run the scripts according to our needs (by Posts, by Pages, by specific URLs, even by device type). A good example of use is with Contact Form, script that should be loaded only in the contact area.
We recommend performing the following practices to speed up our WordPress site in minutes:
● Disable unnecessary scripts and assets that may not be used. Ex: emojis, embeds, dashicons, etc.
● Disable (or limit) the number of post revisions that WordPress stores to prevent our database from growing out of control.
● Change auto save interval- Let's keep fewer automatic drafts by changing the time interval these saves are made, which will also decrease the constant warning “there is a newer version saved”.
● Disable and optimize the Heartbeat API: Heartbeat is capable of causing high CPU usage and producing an unnecessary number of AJAX calls. Can disable Heartbeat to change how often it monitors our site gaining speed of our server.
● Disable comments /URLs if we don't have a blog. We can also evaluate it for blog sites but where the only comments left are SPAM. Another option is to remove links from comments by preventing certain visitors from leaving messages for the sole purpose of getting a backlink.
● Disable Google Maps. Yes, Google Maps is causing terrible slowness and performance issues on our site. But Perfmatters leaves us selectively disable Google Maps to charge it only where we use it.
● Disable WooCommerce cart snippets (AJAX). Application wc-ajax = get_refreshed_fragments can cause huge delays in loading WooCommerce sites. We recommend disabling cart snippets to greatly speed up our website.
● Social Buttons: Normally, social sharing plugins should only be uploaded to Posts. We can easily disable the script everywhere to load it in custom posts or only within a post type.
● The cloud upload feature is often a major cause of website loading slowness. Example: if our Theme uses Google Fonts, the website will probably have a delay in its opening. We suggest disabling Google Fonts and always use the Theme's native fonts.
Did you know that you can have FREE Perfmatters by contracting our service of Managed WordPress?
Lazy Loading of Images
An already popular feature, since many plugins include it. And Perfmatters is no exception. Lazy loading is about delay downloading images, videos or iframes until our users scroll down the page (i.e. delay the loading of such elements until they need to enter the screen for a user to see them).
For posts and pages with lots of images or videos this function works fine: reduces the number of requests to the server that would otherwise occur all at once, sometimes unnecessarily (for example, when the user has already found the information and does not scroll the window down).
In extensive testing, one site was shown to decrease load time by an average 33%.
These are some of the functions linked to Lazy-Loading that Perfmatters allows us:
● Delay loading images including those that are used in the background, delay iframes and also video content (read YouTube embeds, Vimeo, etc.).
● Replace iframes with preview thumbnails and SVG play icon that will only load the video on click. This is the fastest way to upload YouTube videos.
● Perfmatters also delays images of the new webp format.
● DOM Monitoring for better infinite scroll compatibility.
● Tests show that Perfmatters works better and faster than native WordPress lazy loading.
Move WordPress Login
As we well know, the default URL in WordPress to access the Dashboard is /wp-admin/
And not only do we know: Robots and hackers know this, trying to enter our site via that address. So by simply changing our site's login URL, we automatically combat a common problem.
But it not only prevents hacking or malicious entry: moving said URL is also an excellent plan to improve the performance of our site because it decreases the number of robots that crawl common areas of your site taking up resources.
To achieve this we will enter General → Login URL and we will place a folder name to our liking.
CDN Rewrite
a CDN, Content Delivery Network or “content delivery network” helps speed up our WordPress by storing your content on different servers around the world. Thus, they will be downloaded from the server closest to the user's geolocation. The Perfmatters plugin helps us to connect a CDN service to our WordPress site.
Features of CDN Rewrite in Perfmatters:
● After entering our CDN URL, all our assets, images, etc., are will rewrite to point to said CDN.
● We can choose which directories of WordPress we want to include.
● We can exclude file types that we don't want to repoint, and even enter resources with strings.
Host Google Analytics locally
It is not a minor thing, especially when we want our site to have the highest possible score in GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights. One of the SEO improvements has to do with the Google Analytics script. Why? Because this script is called from our site to Google headquarters. Ironically, the Google script itself warns us about caching, but this is because it has a very short HTTP caching header expiration.
Hosting Google Analytics locally will help us speed up our site by reducing additional DNS lookups. At the same time, the problem of "leveraging browser caching" from your script will disappear.
When we host the script locally, HTTP caching headers from our own CDN or hosting server level will be applied automatically. In short, we will have full control over the caching of the script.
Perfmatters functionality for Google Analytics includes:
● We can choose between the five types of script: analytics.js (17KB), gtag.js, gtag.js v4, minimal (only 1.5 KB), and minimal online (in line).
● We can decide from where the code will be loaded, that is, between the header or the footer of our site.
● We are allowed anonymize our IP for data privacy and GDPR purposes.
● We can decide if we want (or not) to save a record and keep track of admins who have logged in.
● We can disable display functions (preventing a second HTTP request).
● We are also allowed adjust bounce rate of our site to better assess the quality of your traffic. This is very useful for blogs with very varied content, where the visitor reads a note taking a minute or two, but then does not enter another link on our same site.
● Perfmatters integrates with MonsterInsights for additional analysis features, but still take advantage of a locally hosted script.
Adding code to the Header, Body or Footer
Sometimes it happens that we need to add custom code to our header, body or footer. Perfmatters also contemplated this and luckily it makes this action easy for us.
The header, body and footer code feature includes:
● Printing of the code directly on the front-end. This includes cases of internal labels <style> inline CSS and JS <script> online.
● We are allowed to upload a JS or CSS file.
● The code added to the header will be printed in the section … from our site.
● The code added to the body will be printed below the opening tag of the <body> of the site.
● The code added to the footer will be printed above the closing tag </body> from our site.
Resource Preload
Preloading Using Attributes relay can help speed up the loading of scripts and resources in our WordPress. In fact, use relay it is recommended by Google in certain cases. Thanks to Perfmatters we can easily add these attributes relay throughout our site, or on selected pages or for certain devices (desktop or mobile).
● Enabling Instant Page allows automatic prefetch of URLs in the background after a user hovers over a link. This is the result almost instant load times.
● Preloading allows us to specify resources (such as fonts or CSS) that are needed immediately as soon as the page loads. This helps us fix typical “render blocking resources” warnings.
● DNS prefetch makes it possible to resolve domain names (ie perform a DNS lookup in the background) before a user clicks in a link. This is another way to help improve performance.
● Preconnect allows the browser to set up connections early before an HTTP request occurs, thereby eliminating round-trip latency and saving users time.
Delay and Defer JavaScript
Again, going back to Google's "Remove Render Blocking Resources" warning, we may find that certain JS is hindering the rendering of our site. And Google itself recommends us to “defer” such JavaScripts until the moment of user interaction..
In the section of assets, scrolling down, we will find the possibility to achieve this.
After activating it we can customize the functionality to taste:
● Add defer tags to all of our JavaScript files so that they load after all other content has loaded.
● Delay inline JavaScript.
● Delay core jQuery (optional).
● Add JavaScript defer exclusions with filenames, paths, or strings.
● Add Per Page/Post JavaScript defer exclusions in WordPress editor.
● Delay JavaScript until user interaction (scroll, mouse movement, etc.). This is great for WooCommerce cart snippets and heavy 3rd party scripts (such as Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, Google Adsense and others).
● Set a timeout that will load the scripts after a period of time determined by us.
Supports WordPress Multisite
If we manage many sites via the WordPress Multisite, we will be interested in evaluating the Perfmatters unlimited license. It supports WordPress multisite setups to easily move settings from our default site to everything else.
Perfmatters Cost
Perfmatters is priced at $24.95 ANNUAL for those who want to use it on a single site. For three sites the value is USD54.95 ANNUAL, and finally we have the UNLIMITED plan whose cost is USD124.95, also ANNUAL. (free for our clients with WP admin).
In the perfmatters official site we found the plans and their complete information.
Conclusions
After testing Perfmatters and checking out their multiple solutions from a single plugin, we concluded that this plugin should be part of our Managed WordPress service along with the rest of our favorite PREMIUM plugins. Perfmatters is a must-have speed optimization plugin for anyone looking to optimize their website.
As we have seen in this note, Perfmatters offers us a huge number of features. The developers behind this plugin work hard to make it even better, and the customer support is as prompt as it is professional.
Perfmatters is very easy to set up and customize, and the price is great when you weigh the amount of enhancements it comes with. Perhaps we regret that all plans are annual without there being one that offers us a lifetime license.
Doubts or queries? Write us in the comments! We read and reply to all messages. Good luck, and thanks for reading.
Leave a Reply