Why don’t all WP hosts offer something like this?

Site Ground have been a revelation for me. Not only has support been excellent, but this plugin makes optimising site load-times a breeze. Their three level caching seems solid and fast. Just switch it on. Only mem-cache needs any configuration and that just involves turning it on in your Site Ground account. Easy.

Having spent (too many) hours playing around with various optimisation and cache utilities I would say that the SG plugin on its own gets you 90% of the way in 5 minutes, with my complex sites immediately going from D/E to A/B or B/B. Why not A/A (we would all love that wouldn’t we?) 1. Oversized and non-optimised images are often my undoing and that is down to the initial images uploaded by me: not something a plugin will fix. (2) Consolidating javascript. Asynch and deferring javascript is complex. A one-click solution is unrealistic although I have got away with it on one site.

Yes, there are some plugins that do parts of the optimisation better, but it is quite a headache trying all of the possible combinations of plugins and settings in an attempt to squeeze that last 2-3% performance out of the set up. That said, here are two I use:

1. Switch off SG lazy-loading (it causes too much jumping and page jag) and install Lazy Loader by Florian Brinkmann & MarcDK – it is as smooth as butter, for only a slight performance hit.

2. SG Async Java option is all or nothing (on or off). If it breaks your site all you can do is disable it. For more control and better results I have found Frank Goossens Async Javascript plugin to be more versatile and effective.

That’s my two-penneth. Hope it is helpful!