Not as good as stated

well, it all depends on your config really; if done right, the penalty is only there once (for the very first visitor, which can be a non-person if you use a cache-warming plugin). if you want I can assist you to get this just right ??

(to be clear; AO is NOT a (page) caching plugin, it only optimizes (and caches) CSS & JS and the combination with a page cache plugin is highly recommended)

have a nice weekend,
frank

Hi, no i fully understand that this isnt a page plugin and in combination with such a plugin Autoptimze would work better. However oné would then have to take into account that most page cache plugins, at least the more known ones, are very resource intensive. This could lead to a situation where the user wouldnt benefit at all.For me also page cache plugins arent an option as quite frankly to my knowledge there arent any good ones out there. Most of them causes issues to a to big portion of their users. Don’t get me wrong, i like the idea of this plugin and if you only could decrease the penalty for new visitors i would definitely use it but 1 sec is just too much.

most page cache plugins, at least the more known ones, are very resource intensive.

this, to me (as a page cache plugin user), comes as a surprise really. page cache plugins have 2 stages;
* one in which the wordpress output is captured and cached (which might have a minimal overhead vs. a non-pagecache wordpress)
* one in which requests are intercepted before wordpress fires and the cached version is returned, which is a lot less resource-heavy then your normal non-pagecache wordpress request

so in my experience page caching plugins actually allow a site to run with a lot less resources really (but off course there are better solutions, e.g. caching reversed proxy solutions based on nginx or varnish).

if you only could decrease the penalty for new visitors i would definitely use it but 1 sec is just too much

well, as stated before; the penalty on users depends on context (how much CSS, how much JS, is it already minified, php version, server specs, …) and config (are you aggregating inline JS and/ or CSS? have you tried excluding some of the JS/ CSS from optimization?).

I’m pretty certain that given the right context & the appropriate config one can easily stay beneath 1s “penalty”.

As I wrote; I’d be happy to review your context & config ??

frank

> BUT there is a huge penalty for new visitors causing the load time in my case to inrease with over 1 second

I can’t agree enough with what you said. You can solve this easily using a cache-warming plugin (interesting term @futtta), such as Preload Fullpage Cache (shameless plug – I am the author of that little plugin).

@futta… what plugin do you recommend as a cache-warming plugin? (I am interested in knowing the alternatives to my plugin)

Cache warming is already integrated into certain plugins in the name of pre-loading. But, configuring “cache warming” is another tricky task that may not go right. Also, I don’t expect every minify plugin or any generic cache plugin to include cache-warming in their plugin. Because, it depends entirely on cron system. Anything depends on cron may fail at times, especially if the cron is not triggered on time.

Summary: No plugin is perfect. Not even WordPress core. Use WP and the plugins wisely. Your users will thank you!

> I’d be happy to review your context & config

Count me in too (conditions apply: please post your query as a support thread and ping me, rather than in reviews!)

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Autoptimize plugin. I don’t use it in any of the sites that I manage. I am here to promote my own *free* plugin and also to help a user (@dragory) to utilise various caching layers effectively!

Protip: If anyone is concerned about the speed / performance of the entire WordPress eco system, use a static site generator to build your site and host it with Amazon CloudFront (or something similar) to have the best possible performance!

I’ve had various problems in the past with loads of cache plugin and everyone has come with issues that has had negative effects on my sites. What i was after was a plugin that only minifies and ive actually found one that doesnt come with penalties whatsoever and it has increased loading times significantly.

Wow! Care to share the name of the plugin that only minifies but increased loading times significantly?

Fast Velocity Minify. Made the site load on average 0.6 seconds faster.

Thanks. According to the description of Fast Velocity Minify, the second paragraph says…

Minification is done in real time and done on the frontend only leading to a slower first request. Once the first request is done the other pages that require the same set of minified CSS and JavaScript will be served with a static cache file.

Highlighting was done by me. ??

I can’t understand how it is different from numerous other caching or minifying plugins (including AO).

Oh, I forgot to mention about Google PageSpeed Module that does things correctly. For example, it doesn’t optimize the first visit, sending the response as it is to the visitor. If there is second request to a particular page, it optimises part of the page (for example 25%). On the following request, it optimises further (for example 50%). The cycle goes on until it reaches 100%. We have an option to override this, by forcing it to optimize everything in one go (on the first visit) by setting ModPagespeedBlockingRewriteKey (or X-PSA-Blocking-Rewrite). Anyway, it is done on the server-side, so out of scope of this topic. I wanted to include it here so whoever reads this topic can understand there are solutions out there!

I still feel it is unfair to provide a destructive or demotivating review just because it doesn’t do things like someone expected it to do, especially the plugin author offered to help to fix any possible issue integrating it with a particular site.

If anyone has a few minutes to spare, please head over to my thoughts for a user’s review for Fast Velocity Minify that didn’t work out of the box for a particular site.

Again, I don’t work for AO or Fast Velocity Minify! Just happened to come across unfair reviews and shared my thoughts on those. Good luck to all!

@pothi it is pretty clear @dragory is an edge case if he is having so many issues with caching problems and minification. Autoptimize continues to be the best solution for minifying and concatenating scripts but for whatever reason it is not working well for @dragory’s sites. If I were @dragory I would get a site audit from a professional to isolate the issue. When so many issues are encountered no matter which caching plugin you use it suggests the issue is with the site rather than the plugins.

@dragory

Used AO on a bunch of live sites and it does work very well. Minification with static page caching will improve your site load time.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Luke Cavanagh. Reason: clarify wording

@pothi; I know WPSC has the capability and someone suggested https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/warm-cache/ to me a year ago or so but I don’t use cache warming myself actually ??

Thanks @futtta. Warm cache plugin looks unique.