Speed matters.

No matter how good is your website, customers will drop off or bounce if the website takes forever to load.

Don’t just take my word.

Industry research shows that the website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time.

In other words, a website loading faster by just 1-2 seconds will realize a much higher revenue than another site (all other factors considered).

There is no shortage of WP caching and speed optimization plugins. However, most speed plugins fail to deliver what they promise.

In this Perfmatters plugin review, we will dive into the background, features, pricing, and pros & cons of this speed optimization plugin. 

By the end of this post, you should be in a better position to assess whether Perfmatters caching plugin is worth your time and money.

Perfmatters Overview

When products are created with passion, they tend to perform better.

Two brothers, Brian and Brett, created the Perfmatters caching plugin.

They bring over 20 years of experience using WordPress.

It is important to note that the duo work on their plugins full-time.

They even wrote on their site that Permatters is not a side hobby for them.

What prompted them to create Perfmatters plugin?

The Jackson brothers were fed up with free WordPress plugins promising speed improvements.

They found that most free plugins were missing important features.

Or, they were not coded efficiently.

Frustrated with the issues with free WP plugins, they decided to change things.

And the idea of Perfmatters lightweight WordPress performance plugin was born.

Perfmatters Feature Overview

The Perfmatters plugin is all about simplicity.

When you install the plugin, you would not have to tweak the code or the functions.php file on your WP website.

The team behind Perfmatters believes that performance optimizations need not be complicated.

You can see this ideology reflect in the functionality of the WP plugin.

You can turn on/off all features of the plugin with just one click.

How does Perfmatter speed up your WordPress website?

At its core, this plugin disables unused/unnecessary scripts on your website to improve website speed.

For instance, you might not want emojis to load on every web page across your WordPress website.

Often, our websites have elements that we do not use regularly.

Together, such elements hurt your website speed.

With Perfmatters, you can disable such unused elements/scripts, thereby reducing your overall number of HTTP requests and your page size.

But that is not all.

Perfmatters also helps with optimizing databases.

When working with WordPress, we do multiple revisions.

Over time, spam comments and auto-drafts can also pile up in your WP database.

This could impact the performance of your WordPress website.

Perfmatters allows you to clean all these with ease.

Moreover, you can prevent these from happening in the future by putting limits.

Let’s talk about the features of the Perfmatters WP plugin in detail.

Quick-Toggle Options

I am a proponent of ease of use and quick features.

With the Perfmatters WP plugin, you can change options through a simple toggle.

For example, you can disable unnecessary scripts and assets such as emojis, embeds, and dash icons by simply using the toggle button.

WordPress stores post revisions.

Over time, this can grow in size, affecting your database.

The toggle switch allows you to both disable and limit post revisions.

You might have come across a “there is a more recent version” prompt in the WP dashboard.

This happens because WP saves the drafts of pages and posts automatically.

Perfmatters quick-toggle allows you to change the autosave interval, thus allowing you to keep fewer auto-drafts in WP.

Have you heard of WordPress Heartbeat?

The WordPress heartbeat is an API service that came along with WP 3.6.

This feature sends a continuous pulse or tick to complete periodic tasks.

As a result, the browser can communicate with the server through AJAX calls.

This provides real-time information on the WordPress dashboard.

The goal of WP Heartbeat is to synchronize data on the server and dashboard.

Sadly, this cool feature consumes many CPU resources and AJAX calls.

Perfmatters allows you to both change the frequency of Heartbeat as well as disable it.

WordPress is notorious for attracting spam comments.

I have tried a lot of ideas to reduce spam comments.

But it is almost impossible to address them.

If our WP site does not have a blog, you can use Perfmatters to disable comments and URLs.

Google Maps is an important aspect for local SEO.

You can also disable Google Maps if it is impacting your website performance.

Alternatively, you can disable Google Maps selectively.

And allow google maps to load only on a specific page or pages.

If you are running a Woocommerce website, you might have observed huge delays on the site.

This is due to the wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments request.

Use the quick-toggle on Perfmatters to disable WooCommerce cart fragments (AJAX).

Built-In Script Manager

Thanks to the built-in script manager in Perfmatters, you can disable scripts on a post/page or across your entire website with a simple click.

In Perfmatters script manager, all scripts are organized in groups as per their plugins and theme.

This allows the user to see which one is being used for what purpose.

Did you know you can also disable scripts by the device (desktop or mobile)?

And that is not all.

You can also disable scripts by logged in or logged out state of the device. 

I have observed this feature to have a tremendous impact on the speed of your WP website.

Let’s talk about specific examples of this script manager feature.

Contact Form 7 Plugin

This plugin loads on all web pages of the site.

I am sure you would not need this plugin on every page.

With Perfmatters, you can disable this plugin to load on every page.

Just enable it on the contact page, and you should see the difference in page speed.

More Reading: How To Reduce Contact Form 7 (CF7) Spam

Social media sharing plugins

The same applies to plugins used for sharing on social platforms.

In most cases, you only need social media sharing plugins on your blog posts.

Use the Perfmatters Script Manager to disable these plugins from loading on all pages except on the blog posts.

Advanced Features

Until now, we talked about the basic features of the script manager of Perfmatters,

These should be enough for the beginner user.

However, for advanced users, the Script Manager packs a range of advanced features.

For example, it allows you to use the Regex function to disable any combination of scripts.

The Script Manager comes with a MU mode, using which you can have granular control over a plugin- front-end scripts, inline code, and MySQL queries.

You can even disable the plugin completely using the MU mode.

Finally, we have the Testing Mode that you can use to preview your configuration before applying the changes to your public site.

Database Optimization

One of the key components of a healthy and fast website is its database.

Your WordPress database, over time, can become home to hundreds of thousands of rows. 

This, in turn, starts slowing down your website.

This is why WordPress website owners need to focus on database optimization from time to time.

With the Perfmatters WP plugin, you can easily clean up and delete old and unused data. 

For example, you can delete revisions (posts, pages, and custom post types).

The Plugin also allows you to delete old auto-drafts that are saved when you’re editing content.

You can also delete WordPress spam comments and clean up your trash from comments and posts.

The WP plugin allows you to delete expired transients and keep your wp_options table clean.

Finally, you can optimize your database tables to restore unused space.

Another cool thing about the Perfmatters Plugin is that it lets you schedule automatic database optimization on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Lazy Loading

If you have been using WordPress, you might already be familiar with the concept of lazy loading.

This delays the loading of images, videos, or iframes until a user scroll downs the webpage.

This feature is extremely useful for posts and pages containing a ton of images or videos.

Lazy loading reduces the number of requests happening simultaneously.

As per tests, websites can realize over a 30% decrease in loading times using lazy loading.

Let’s dive into some of the essential lazy load features in the Perfmatters WP plugin.

The Plugin allows lazy loading for images, inline background images, iframes, and videos.

If you are using YouTube videos on your WP website, you can use the Perfmatters WP plugin to replace iframes with youtube preview thumbnails and SVG play icon which loads the video on click. 

The plugin offers WebP support as well as DOM monitoring for better infinite scroll.

WordPress Login URL

As I mentioned earlier, WordPress attracts a ton of bots and hackers.

A simple way to deal with this is to change the login URL.

By default, a WP login URL would look like this: https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

Perfmatters WP plugin lets you change your login URL quickly.

CDN Rewrite

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) can make all the difference in website speed.

Since it stores your website assets on different servers globally and delivers those assets from the cache closest to the website visitor, the result is a faster and better user experience for the visitor.

You can use the Perfmatters WP plugin to connect a CDN to your WordPress site.

Host Google Analytics Locally

Without analytics, you cannot measure the growth of your website.

Did you know that with the Perfmatters WP plugin, you can host Google Analytics locally?

This can help speed up your WordPress site by reducing extra DNS lookups.

It also resolves the “leverage browser caching” issue from the Google Analytics script.

With the Perfmatters WP Plugin, you get to choose from five different Google Analytics code scripts- analytics.js (17 KB), gtag.js, gtag.js v4, minimal (only 1.5 KB), and minimal inline.

You can even alter the tracking code position of Google Analytics between the header or footer of your WordPress site.

Add Custom Code

Until now, we have talked about readymade features to speed up your WP website.

What if you want to add custom code to your WordPress site’s header, body, or footer?

Thanks to the Perfmatters plugin, you can easily add custom code to your website.

Preloading Resources

With this plugin, you can preload the website using rel attributes, and speed up your site load time. 

Perfmatters plugin lets you add these attributes across your entire website, on select pages, or specific devices (desktop or mobile).

Multisite Support

Some users might have more than one WordPress website.

Handling multiple websites can be a pain at times.

The Perfmatters unlimited license supports multiple WordPress website setups.

Now that we have covered all the important features of Perfmatters Plugin, let’s throw light on its pricing plans.

Perfmatters Pricing Overview

You can choose from three different plans: Perfmatters Personal, Perfmatters Business, and Perfmatters Unlimited Sites.

Perfmatters Personal 

This pricing plan is ideal for a single WP website.

The Personal plan offers 1-year premium support & updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The Personal plan costs $24.95 per year.

Perfmatters Business

If you have more than one WP website, you can try the Perfmatters Business plan.

This package offers licenses for three websites.

Like the personal plan, this package also offers 1-year premium support & updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The Business plan costs $54.95 per year.

Perfmatters Unlimited

For unlimited websites, the Perfmatters Unlimited plan is a good choice.

This package costs $124.95 per year.

On top of the  1-year premium support & updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee, the Unlimited plan offers multisite support.

All plans offer a fully protected by 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee, and a 15% discount is automatically applied to all renewals.

Perfmatters Review: Pros & Cons

The biggest strength of Perfmatters is the dedicated team behind the Plugin.

The pricing is competitive, and the Plugin comes with a ton of features.

They also have great customer support.

Overall, the Plugin is easy to use and delivers what it promises.

On the flip side, this plugin does not offer a lifetime license.

Perfmatters Conclusion

If you are frustrated with slow-loading WordPress websites and have tried all tips and tricks for load optimization, you’d love Perfmatters.

This WordPress plugin will surely improve your website load time, thereby improving web performance.