Swift Performance is a caching plugin. it is competing directly with some of the big names in the market. Does Swift Performance live up to its name? Let’s find out in my Swift Performance plugin review!
Swift Performance Performance
I have tried many caching plugins before like WP Rocket, Autopmtimize, SiteGround SuperCacher and even OpenLiteSpeed Server cache plugin. None of them were as good as Swift Performance. Even with its default settings, it’s miles ahead of Autoptimize and SiteGround SuperCacher and trades blows with WP Rocket and OpenLiteSpeed plugin.
The above picture is the result with Swift Performance enabled with its default settings
Features of Swift Performance
Let’s see some of the main features of the plugin:
- Basic features are free. To get the complete feature set, you have to pay for a license.
- It’s compatible with WooCommerce, WPML, bbPress, Cloudflare and Varnish.
- Minify and combine CSS and JS.
- Database Optimization.
- Plugin Organization.
- Image Optimization.
- Lazy Loader.
Some of the features mentioned above are only available in the premium version of the plugin.
Some Interesting Features
Some of the interesting features of the plugin is given below:
Plugin Organizer
This is an interesting feature because it helps to exclude certain plugin scripts on the pages where they are not needed.
One use case can be contact form plugin scripts. It does not make sense to call the contact form script for the whole website if you have the contact form only on one page of the site. Here is where the plugin organizer comes into the picture. It will ensure that the contact form scripts only load on the page which has the form on it.
Image Optimizer
Image optimization is really important on the internet as it decreases file size, thus improving website loading speed. Swift performance helps you to achieve this but it’s only in the paid version.
Some of its features are:
- Single or batch image optimization.
- JPEG and PNG format supported.
- Image compression level can be selected.
ALSO READ: WP Rocket Review
Database Optimizer
It is important to clean and optimize the database from time to time to ensure smooth functioning of the database and also it ensures that the site performance remains top notch.
Swift Performance does this for you and also you can schedule it to do automatically at a specified time.
Warning
ALWAYS make a backup of your database before optimizing it.
Pricing
While the basic plugin is free, if you want to use all of its features like image optimization and more, you will need to upgrade to a paid license. The pricing is as follows:
Verdict
Swift Performance is a relatively new player in the caching plugins market of WordPress. But, in this short time, it has become highly popular but there are some issues with it.
It doesn’t have that much documentation available (as it’s a relatively new plugin). They don’t have detailed explaination on their website about what the different functions do.
Warning
Swift Performance can cause issues when indexing AMP pages. To fix this, Just go to Settings -> Caching -> Exclude URL and add /amp/. Once you do this, delete your cache. Once you have done this, go to https://search.google.com/test/amp to check if your AMP pages are being indexed correctly o
If you have any queries or suggestions, then please let me know in the comments down below.
ALSO READ: OceanWP Theme Review
