Summary

Swift Performance plugin is not just a cache plugin, it has numerous awesome features to improve your site speed performances. It is rather “young” speed optimization plugin, but very promising with a potential to be high selling all in one optimization plugin.

We replaced 5 speed up plugins on the site with Swift: SG Optimizer, WP Rocket, WP-Optimize, Imagify, Heartbeat Control.

There are many innovative speed up optimization features in it, my favourite is how easy it is to setup.

To all of you complaining that it isn’t effective on your sites: you should do a bit more, take your time, open a ticket and everything would be fine, I am sure of it. If you are still not sure about it – you can just try free 3 days trial.

Usage Simplicity

Swift Performance plugin is very powerful WordPress speed up tool for beginners & experts. Although it has a guided setup wizard, which is very easy for basic usage, on some hostings/websites, this plugin still needs some “experts” touch with setup which makes it sometimes difficult for noobs. But don’t worry – Support will give you all the help you need for most appropriate setup for your site, which is free of charge.

Features

Swift Performance plugin has a lot of speed up performance features, among which some unique ones on the market. The best of all is that new features are constantly added. Main features are:

• Eliminate render blocking assets

• Swift Performance plugin not just minify and combine the CSS and javascript files, but it can create critical CSS on the fly for your pages. The critical CSS will be generated on the fly for every pages. It will contain only that rules what are used on the current page. You can also inline the critical CSS, and/or the merged CSS as well.

• Innovative, super fast cache

• Swift Performance plugin provide intelligent caching, you can cache AJAX requests and dynamic requests as well.

• Intelligent cache means the following: the plugin loads the cached version (so the user can see your page fast), after it will check in the background the cache is it still valid or was there any change if you enable the save server resources option (recommended) it will check the cache only once per an hour, but it will check it immediately if there was any requests which can affect the content (eg comment, forum post, etc).

• You can also set instant reload, in that case after the check ran in the background it will change the page content for the user (if there wasn’t any user action eg: typing).

• The latest feature is autoconfig which allows Swift to automatically choose the best plugin’s setup for the current site.

• Unlimited image & database optimizer and plugin organizer

• Swift Performance plugin comes with a built-in unlimited image optimizer on unlimited sites. You can losslessly compress your JPEG and PNG images, and improve your site’s performance. There are also a very powerful database optimizer along with plugin organizer. There features alone allows you to replace several plugins with Swift plugin’s usage.

• Proxy 3rd party Javascript (like Google Analytics)

• With the 3rd party proxy you can proxy Google Analytics, Facebook, etc scripts which usually have a very short expire (to be able track the users) and set an acceptable expiry header for them.

• CDN support

• Swift Performance plugin provides CDN support. You can specify a hostname what will be used for static resources. You can also set 3 different hosts for CSS, JS and for media files.

Speed

Swift Performance plugin is a simple solution for speeding up websites without any coding knowledge. It comes with many powerful features serving as a “Swiss  Army knife” for speeding up WordPress websites. For us, it proved to be especially effective on websites with some more demanding requirements such as AJAX and dynamic requests, like on this site.

Security

Plugin’s author gives an utmost effort for Swift Performance plugin to code according to the best security guidelines/practices.

Support

I found customer support really good and knowledgeable, although in some period it can be slow in reactions. However, the good news is they are aware of it and already “speed up” it up.

• If you need help with Pro version configuration & other topics, you can send them a ticket on their site and you will get a paid support

• If you need a free support, you can ask on Swift’s WordPress.org

You have free Swift Performance plugin documentation here,

You can also join very active & growing Swift Performance plugin’s Facebook group:

Other Points

Swift is compatible with Varnish & WooCommerce.

Swift Performance plugin pricing is affordable and fair for the numerous numbers of the features it offers.

However, if you want to try a 3-day fully featured plugin’s trial free of  charge – you can get your copy here or if  you want to try Swift Performance Lite on WordPress.org. We also prepared some exclusive discount coupons for members in some Facebook groups.

What others say on WordPress.org about their experiences with Swift Performance:

My Swift Optimized Default Settings

Innovative Technology

You can combine javascripts and move them to footer to reduce the number of requests and eliminate render blocking javascripts.

For example, if there are 3 javascripts on your page:

If you combine them:

In that case first script and second script can run only if the whole combined script was loaded.

If you enable Async Execute feature (it is not enabled by default) it will combine the scripts, but separate them with boundaries:

When the page was loaded (HTML and CSS) it will send an AJAX request to load the combined script. When browser loads an AJAX script, the callback function will get the response in chunks. Once a chunk was received, Swift will run the already downloaded scripts, while the rest is still downloading.

So if your combined script is 1.2Mb, by default the browser needs to load 1.2Mb to run the first script. With Async Execute it will run the first script let’s say when 18Kb was loaded.

You can see, that it won’t decrease the load time, it will speed up only the rendering. So basically it will provide better user experience, faster page, but if you test it with a test tool like GTMetrix, you will still get the same fully loaded time and the AJAX request will appear in the waterfall as well.

You can all also try this on your website, just enable the Async Execute, run a test, disable it, run it again. You will see that nothing is hidden and the load time will be the same.

Original Post written by Freelancertools.com