Perfmatters Review: Is It Worth It?
Perfmatters Review
In this Perfmatters review, we will be examining whether or not Perfmatters is worth your money.
Background And History
Perfmatters was founded by two brothers who love WordPress, and between the two of them have over 19 years of experience using it on a daily basis. Brian and Brett work on their plugins full-time; this isn’t just a side hobby for them. Debugging code, listening to customer’s feedback, and responding to support tickets is something they thoroughly enjoy.
They were frustrated with the free plugins out there that aim to speed up websites. Every time they came across one, it was always missing a few critical features, not coded in an efficient manner, or just trying to push advertising. So they decided to build their own plugin.
Perfmatters is a combination of performance optimizations they use across all of our sites.
Brian, the co-founder of forgemedia LLC, and former CMO at Kinsta, has worked extensively in the WordPress hosting sector and CDN industry. Brian has been knee-deep in web performance for years and has optimized thousands of sites. he has also published hundreds of articles pertaining to WordPress optimization and ways to speed up websites.
WordPress is a huge passion of his, and everything he does has revolved around the WordPress community for the past 12+ years. He also blogs over at woorkup about WordPress, SEO, marketing, and productivity.
Brett, co-founder of forgemedia LLC, is a web developer who loves building awesome web applications and, of course, anything WordPress. Previously he has worked at an agency where he was responsible for building, maintaining, and optimizing clients’ sites so that they could achieve their marketing goals. That also included sysadmin activities, such as updating PHP, managing servers, etc.
Brett is constantly figuring out new performance optimizations that he can implement to speed up WordPress. He is also nitpicky when it comes to UI and spend a lot of time ensuring plugins result in good user experience.
Features
The team developed the Perfmatters plugin with simplicity in mind. With Pergmatters there is no messing around with code or your functions.php file. Performance optimizations shouldn’t have to be complicated and so everything can be enabled/disabled with a single click.
The main way this plugin helps speed up your site is by disabling scripts that might not be used on your site. For example, by default emojis load on every single page of your site. If you don’t use them, this is simply slowing it down. By disabling it, the script no longer loads and so it reduces your overall number of HTTP requests and your page size.
Another helpful feature is database optimization. Over time things like revisions, auto-drafts, spam comments, and transients start to fill up your database and before you know it, it’s impacting the performance of your site. With Perfmatters you can easily clean all of these up and even put limits in place to prevent it from happening again. This ensures a fast and snappy database.
Quick-toggle options
Many of Perfmatter’s options can be applied by simply toggling them on. Here’s a quick look at a few that the team recommends you to utilize:
Disable emojis, embeds, dashicons
Disable unnecessary scripts and assets you might not be using on your site, such as emojis, embeds, dashicons, etc.
Disable or limit post revisions
Disable or limit the number of post revisions that WordPress stores to keep your database from growing out of control.
Change autosave interval
Keep fewer auto-drafts by changing your autosave interval. It also decreases the annoying “there is a more recent version” warning.
Disable and tweak Heartbeat API
Heartbeat can cause high CPU usage and a crazy amount of AJAX calls. You can disable Heartbeat and also change the frequency.
Disable comments and URLs
No blog? Disable comments sitewide to reduce spam, or remove author comment links to stop people from just trying to get a backlink.
Disable Google maps
Google Maps can wreak havoc on your site’s performance. You can disable Google Maps selectively, and only load it where you need it.
Disable WooCommerce cart fragments (AJAX)
The wc-ajax=get_refreshed_fragments request can cause huge delays on WooCommerce sites. Disable cart fragments on your site.
Script Manager
The Perfmatters plugin has a robust Script Manager built-in. This allows you to disable scripts on a per post/page basis or across your entire site with a simple click. All scripts are grouped by their respective plugin and theme so you can easily see which scripts are being used by what. You can also disable scripts by device (desktop or mobile) and logged in or logged out state. This is very powerful and can drastically increase the speed on your WordPress sites (especially your homepage).
A few examples of what this can be used for:
- The popular Contact Form 7 plugin loads itself on every page and post. You can easily disable it everywhere with one click and enable it only on your contact page.
- Social media sharing plugins should only be loaded on your posts. You can easily disable it everywhere and load only on post types, or even custom post types.
We designed the Script Manager to be easy to use, and yet there are many advanced features under the hood. For example, you can disable any combination of scripts using Regex.
MU mode takes the Script Manager to a whole new level. You can control every aspect of a plugin, from its front-end scripts, inline code, and MySQL queries (disable plugins entirely).
Use Testing Mode (New) to safely preview your configuration before applying the changes to your public site.
Database Optimization New
Optimizing your WordPress database is important when it comes to keeping your site healthy and running fast. Over time things like this can easily start to add up to hundreds of thousands of rows. Just like you would oil and maintain your car, you should also do regular maintenance on your database.
The Perfmatters plugin lets you easily clean up and delete old and unused data. Here are just a few ways:
- Delete revisions (posts, pages, and custom post types).
- Delete old auto-drafts that are saved when you’re editing content.
- Delete WordPress spam comments in one fell swoop.
- Clean up your trash from comments and posts.
- Delete expired transients and keep your
wp_optionstable clean. - Optimize your database tables to reclaim unused space.
You can also save your settings to come back later or schedule automatic database optimization on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is great for those of you with clients or too busy to keep up with regular maintenance.
Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is essentially delaying the loading of images, videos, or iframes until a user scroll downs the page (they enter the viewport). For posts and pages with a lot of images or videos, this is so important to reduce the number of requests happening right off the bat. In tests, an average 33% decrease in load times has been achieved.
If you aren’t lazy loading yet, you should be. Here a few lazy load features in the Perfmatters plugin:
- Lazy load images, inline background images, iframes, and videos (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.).
- Swap out iframes with preview thumbnail and SVG play icon which loads the video on click. This is the fastest way to load YouTube videos.
- WebP support.
- DOM monitoring for better infinite scroll compatibility.
- Faster than the default native lazy loading in WordPress.
Change your WordPress login URL
Sometimes the smallest of changes can make a huge impact. By default, WordPress uses https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ for your login URL. The problem with this is that bots, hackers, etc. all scan for these when looking for vulnerabilities and entry points into your site. The Perfmatters team has worked with many sites that see 10,000+ failed attempts per day trying to gain access.
By simply changing your WordPress login URL to something more obscure, you can combat this. It’s also great for performance as it decreases bots scraping common areas of your site.
You can change your login URL in the Perfmatters plugin in just a few seconds.
CDN rewrite
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps speed up your WordPress site by storing your assets on different servers (POPs) around the globe and delivering those from cache closer to the visitor. The Perfmatters plugin helps hook up a CDN to your WordPress site.
Here are a few features of Perfmatter’s CDN rewrite:
- Input your CDN URL and all of your assets, images, etc. will be rewritten to point to your CDN.
- You can choose which WordPress directories you want to include.
- Exclude file types and even assets with strings from being rewritten.
Host Google Analytics locally
Hosting Google Analytics locally can help speed up your site by reducing extra DNS lookups and resolving the “leverage browser caching” issue from their script.
Ironically Google’s own script throws a warning about caching, but this is because they have their HTTP caching header expiration set really short. When you host it yourself, your own CDN or server’s HTTP caching headers will automatically be applied. In other words, you have full control over the caching of the script.
The Perfmatters Google Analytics feature includes:
- Choose between five script types: analytics.js (17 KB), gtag.js, gtag.js v4, minimal (only 1.5 KB), and minimal inline.
- Change the tracking code position between the header or footer of your site.
- Anonymize your IP for data privacy and GDPR purposes.
- Choose whether or not to track logged-in admins.
- Disable display features. This gets rid of a second HTTP request.
- Adjust your site’s bounce rate to better evaluate the quality of your traffic.
- Integration with MonsterInsights for additional analytics features while still taking advantage of a locally hosted script.
Add Code To Header, Body, Footer
There are times when you might need to add custom code to your WordPress site’s header (head), body, or footer. With the Perfmatters plugin, you can easily include custom code where you need it.
The header, body, footer code feature includes:
- Print out code directly on the front end. This could include inline CSS inside
<style>tags or inline JS inside<script>tags. - You can load a JS or CSS file.
- Code added to the header will print in the
<head> </head>section on your site. - Code added to the body will print below the opening
<body>tag on your site. - Code added to the footer will print above the closing
</body>tag on your site.
Preloading Resources
Preloading using rel attributes can help speed up the loading of scripts and resources on your WordPress site. They are even recommended by Google when appropriate. You can easily add these attributes across your whole site, on select pages, or devices (desktop or mobile).
- Instant Page lets you automatically prefetch URLs in the background after a user hovers over a link. This results in almost instantaneous load times.
- Preload allows you to specify resources like fonts or CSS that are needed right away during a page load. This helps fix render-blocking resource warnings.
- DNS prefetch allows you to resolve domain names (perform a DNS lookup in the background) before a user clicks on a link, which in turn can help improve performance.
- Preconnect allows the browser to set up early connections before an HTTP request, eliminating round-trip latency and saving time for users.
Defer and Delay JavaScript New
Familiar with the “Eliminate render-blocking resources” warning? This means JavaScript is slowing down (blocking) the first paint of your WordPress site’s page when loading. As Google recommends, an easy way to speed up the paint of a page is to defer JavaScript. Another powerful approach is to delay JavaScript until user interaction. You can do both with the Perfmatters plugin.
- Add
defertags to all of your JavaScript files. This means the scripts will load after the rest of the page has loaded. - Defer inline JavaScript.
- Defer jQuery core (optional).
- Add JavaScript deferral exclusions with file names, paths, or strings.
- Add JavaScript deferral exclusions per individual page/post in the WordPress editor.
- Delay JavaScript until user interaction (scrolling, moving mouse, etc.). This is great for WooCommerce cart fragments and heavy third-party scripts like Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, Google Adsense, and more.
- Set a timeout that will load scripts after a set amount of time.
Multisite Support
Have a lot of WordPress sites? No problem. The Perfmatters unlimited license supports WordPress multisite setups. This allows you to easily push the settings from your network default site to your subsites.
Multisite setups include the following features:
- Network activate the plugin and activate your license from the network admin.
- Assign different types of network access: Site Admins or Super Admins only.
- Quickly push your configured settings from your default network site to your other subsites.
Support And Ongoing Development
With Perfmatters, you get help directly from the developers of the plugin. The team has over 19 years of experience working with WordPress on a daily basis.
Developing plugins isn’t just a side hobby for the team it’s what they do full-time. The team is continuously releasing new features and fixing bugs. Their plugins are always tested with the latest versions of WordPress.
The team also believes having good documentation saves everyone time. That’s why they have 80+ step-by-step docs on how to use and best configure Perfmatters.
Subscription Plans
Perfmatters offers three different plans:
Perfmatters - Unlimited Sites
- 1-year premium support & updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Multisite support
-
1-year premium support & updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- 1-year premium support & updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Pricing
Use our Perfmatters Discount code RUSHRADAR and get 20& OFF
Perfmatters - Unlimited Sites
16% Automatic Discount
+ 20% OFF with Perfmatters Discount Code
Total Savings: $49.95
$149.95/yr $99.96/yr
20% OFF with Perfmatters Discount Code
Total Savings: $10.99
$54.95/yr $43.96/yr
20% OFF with Perfmatters Discount Code
Total Savings: $49.95
$24.95/yr $19.96/yr
Perfmatters Pros & Cons
Perfmatters: Pros
- Dedicated team
- Great pricing
- Ton of features
- Top-notch customer support
- Ease-of-use
Perfmatters: Cons
- No lifetime license available
Perfmatters Review: Verdict
After our Perfmatters review, we concluded that this is a must-have speed optimization plugin for anyone looking to optimize their website, it truly is the absolute best plugin for speed optimization!
Perfmatters offers a ton of features, it has an extremely dedicated team, it has top-notch customer support, incredibly helpful! It's very easy to set up and customize, and the pricing is unbeatable!
The only downside is that it doesn't offer a lifetime license which would be very convenient.
If you would like to get 20% OFF Perfmatters, you can use our Perfmatters discount code RUSHRADAR
