xSpeed Cache Blog

Speed Up Your WordPress Sites

Get performance tips, tutorials, best practices, and exclusive deals.

Cache Hit, Still Slow: 6 in 10 of Those Sites Have a Fast Server and No Edge Oct 12, 2026 What's New in xSpeed Cache Free v1.4.1 and Pro v1.3.1 Oct 11, 2026 Two Gates Refuse Your WordPress HTML at the Cloudflare Edge, and the Free Plan Clears Both Oct 11, 2026 Redis Object Cache Has Three Options for Failure. Object Cache Pro Has Twelve, for $950 a Year. Oct 10, 2026 Five of Seven Hosts Document No Entry-Plan Object Cache, and 519 of the 539 Sites in Our 2026 Census Are on Them Oct 9, 2026 A Form Stopped Submitting After You Enabled Caching, and the Nonce Is Usually Innocent Oct 8, 2026 xSpeed Cache September 2026 Release Recap Oct 7, 2026 Fix Render-Blocking CSS and JavaScript in 2026: WordPress Asks for Defer on Two of Its Own 190 Scripts Oct 7, 2026 Nine Caching Licences, Three Years: The Cheapest in 2026 Is Fourth by 2029 Oct 6, 2026 xSpeed Cache Hits 10,000+ Active Installs: Thank You for Making xSpeed Cache WordPress's Fastest-Growing AI-Native Caching Plugin Oct 5, 2026 Google Fonts Tuned Right Still Trails Self-Hosting by 1.9 Seconds Oct 5, 2026 Prove the Edge Is Answering in 2026: One Response Can Report a Cache Hit and DYNAMIC at the Same Time Oct 4, 2026 No Cache Header at All From LiteSpeed Cache, and Why a MISS Would Be Good News Oct 4, 2026 Speed Up WordPress Before the Caching Plugin: Core 7.1 Already Prefetches and Lazy-Loads, and Two Gates Switch It Off Oct 4, 2026 Three of the Four Optimization Switches Break Elementor and Divi in 2026, and the Fourth Is Already Switched Off for You Oct 4, 2026 Fix the Bytes First: Only 86 of 1,270 WordPress Sites Have a Clean Server, and 66 of Those Still Fail Mobile LCP Oct 4, 2026 FlyingPress Pricing in 2026: The CDN Costs Twice the Licence, and an Expired Licence Stops the Plugin Oct 4, 2026 A Cache Hit Buys 481ms of First Byte and 2% of LCP in 2026 Oct 3, 2026 Only the Homepage Caches: A Question Mark in the URL Is Enough to Stop the Rest Oct 3, 2026 Preloading the WordPress Cache in 2026: A 200 Response Is Not a Stored Page Oct 3, 2026 Cloudflare APO vs a Page Cache on Your Origin in 2026: $5 a Month to Cache HTML, $200 to Add One Cookie Oct 3, 2026 A Third of WordPress Images Are Too Wide for Any Phone in 2026, and They Carry 73% of the Bytes Oct 3, 2026 Fast for You, Slow Abroad: It Depends Who Answers Your First Byte Oct 2, 2026 The Font Arrives Late and the Text Jumps: Swap Does That by Design Oct 2, 2026 WordPress Cache Exclusions in 2026: Adding an Asterisk Makes the Rule Match Less Oct 2, 2026 WP Rocket vs SiteGround Optimizer in 2026: One Checks Your Filesystem, the Other Checks Its Licence Server Oct 2, 2026 The 260ms Nobody Caches: 88% of WordPress Sites Redirect an http Visitor Before Serving a Byte in 2026 Oct 2, 2026 Enabling Browser Caching in WordPress in 2026: Send Nothing and the Browser Guesses 10% Oct 2, 2026 The Cache Folder Keeps Growing: Expiring a Page and Deleting It Are Two Different Jobs Oct 1, 2026 The Post Changed and the Homepage Did Not: Auto-Purge Only Clears the Pages You Ticked Oct 1, 2026 FlyingPress vs LiteSpeed Cache in 2026: The Free Plugin Is a Bridge to a Cache Engine You May Not Own Sep 30, 2026 The Smallest Score Gap Was the Worst News: Triaging 1,110 WordPress Speed Reports Graded on Two Devices in 2026 Sep 30, 2026 PageSpeed Says the Page Is Not Cached: Its Audit Only Reads Fonts, Images and Scripts Sep 29, 2026 Checking Whether Your Host Supports Object Caching in 2026: WordPress Never Opens the Connection Sep 29, 2026 WP-Optimize vs WP Rocket 2026: Only One Compresses an Image, and It Sends the File Somewhere Else Sep 29, 2026 Brotli Was Bigger Than Gzip on 31% of WordPress Sites in 2026: Read the Bytes, Not the Header Sep 29, 2026 Delay JavaScript Broke the Menu: The Script Ran After the Event It Was Waiting For Sep 28, 2026 Removing Unused CSS From WordPress in 2026: Lighthouse Skips Every Sheet Under 10 KiB Sep 28, 2026 We Scored 11 WordPress Cache Plugins Twice in 2026, and One Criterion Moved Us From First to Fourth Sep 28, 2026 Adding a CDN Took 29ms Off WordPress TTFB in 2026. Making the Edge Answer Took 298 Sep 28, 2026 Reducing WordPress TTFB in 2026: The Number in Site Health Is Not Time to First Byte Sep 27, 2026 NitroPack vs WP Rocket: Four Metered Limits, One Flat Licence, and Three Cloud Jobs Inside the Plugin in 2026 Sep 27, 2026 The 350 KB Cliff: Where Page Weight Starts Deciding Mobile LCP on 912 WordPress Sites in 2026 Sep 27, 2026 Fast Signed Out, Slow Signed In: Every Request You Make Runs the Whole of WordPress Sep 26, 2026 W3 Total Cache vs WP Super Cache in 2026: 510 Configuration Keys Against One Click That Sets Four Sep 26, 2026 Clearing Every WordPress Cache in 2026: Your Database Is Holding One of Them Sep 26, 2026 45% of the WordPress Sites Our Scan Calls Clean Are Failing Google in 2026: Lab Scores Against Field Data Sep 26, 2026 Every Image Is WebP and the Page Weight Did Not Move: Format Saved 38%, Pixels Saved 93% Sep 25, 2026 Managing Caching Across Client Sites With Claude in 2026: Every Flag Said Yes and One Site Served Nothing Sep 25, 2026 WP Fastest Cache vs WP Rocket, 2026: Six Things Stop When the Licence Lapses, Three of Them 15 Days Later Sep 25, 2026 What an AI Agent Sees on 1,567 WordPress Sites in 2026: Thin Text Costs More Than robots.txt Sep 25, 2026 A Preload That Never Ends and a Preload That Never Started Look the Same Sep 24, 2026 Reading a PageSpeed Report in 2026: 30% of the Score Is a Metric Google Does Not Rank You On Sep 24, 2026 FlyingPress vs WP Rocket in 2026: One of Them Serves the First Visitor an Unoptimized Page Sep 24, 2026 Ten of Fourteen Cache Plugins Write the Same File: The WordPress Conflict Nobody Documents in 2026 Sep 24, 2026 The First Byte Is Fast and the Page Still Is Not: LCP Has Four Parts and You Fixed One Sep 23, 2026 WooCommerce Cache Exclusions Decide What Gets Stored, Not What Gets Served Sep 23, 2026 WooCommerce Caching in 2026: Three Plugins Stop a Shopper From Writing Your Public Cache Sep 23, 2026 Redis Refused 4,600 of 6,000 Writes at Its Memory Cap: Choosing a WordPress Object Cache in 2026 Sep 23, 2026 The Hit Rate Dropped Overnight and the Cache Never Changed Sep 22, 2026 Meet xSpeed Cache: A Smarter Way to Make WordPress Faster with AI-Native Features Sep 22, 2026 Cloudflare Caches 56 File Types, and HTML Is Not One of Them Sep 22, 2026 WP Rocket Pricing in 2026: There Is Nothing Between 3 Sites and 50 Sep 22, 2026 48% of WordPress Sites Have Under 100ms of Cache Headroom: When Not to Use a Caching Plugin in 2026 Sep 22, 2026 The Theme Looks Unstyled and Minify Is the Only Thing You Changed Sep 21, 2026 A Logged-Out Visitor Is Seeing Someone Else's Name Sep 10, 2026 Migrating from WP Rocket: Delete It First and There Is Nothing Left to Import Sep 10, 2026 Perfmatters vs a Caching Plugin in 2026: Only One Feature Does Not Overlap Sep 10, 2026 Take the Server Out Entirely and 93% of Slow WordPress Sites Are Still Slow: Why Caching Did Not Fix Yours Sep 10, 2026 Same Site, New Host, Worse TTFB: What Silently Changed Sep 9, 2026 The Same Page Scored 61 and 73 Twelve Minutes Apart: How to Benchmark WordPress Caching Plugins in 2026 Sep 9, 2026 Redis Object Caching on WordPress: Setup That Survives a Redis Restart Sep 9, 2026 Free WordPress Caching Plugins in 2026: Which Ones Actually Cache Sep 9, 2026 You Purged the Cache and the Page Is Still Old Sep 8, 2026 How to Check Whether WordPress Caching Is Actually Working Sep 8, 2026 NitroPack Alternatives: What You Give Up and What You Get Back Sep 8, 2026 958 Sites Scanned in 2026: Caching Cut TTFB by 73% and Left LCP Untouched Sep 8, 2026 WP Rocket vs LiteSpeed Cache: The Comparison That Depends on Your Server Sep 7, 2026 LiteSpeed Cache on Nginx or Apache: What You Actually Get in 2026 Sep 7, 2026 Connecting Claude to a WordPress Fleet in 2026: One of These Five Routes You May Already Be Paying For Aug 26, 2026 9 Best WP Rocket Alternatives in 2026: Ranked on Real Core Web Vitals Data Aug 26, 2026 10 Best WordPress MCP Servers in 2026: 486 in the Directory, Four With More Than Ten Reviews Aug 26, 2026 xSpeed Cache MCP vs WP Rocket MCP in 2026: One Connects Once, the Other Once Per Site Aug 26, 2026 How to Optimize Your WooCommerce Checkout Page in 2026 Aug 11, 2026 How to Let Claude or ChatGPT Manage Your WordPress Site Speed (via MCP) Aug 6, 2026 Boost Your WordPress Site's Visibility in AI Search in 2026: What a Cited Page Has That a Ranked Page Does Not Jul 28, 2026 xSpeed Cache MCP in 2026: The Tool List Is Not Fixed, and Write Access Is Free Jul 15, 2026 How to Set Up xSpeed Cache on WordPress in 2026 Jul 15, 2026

TTFBHosting

Cache Hit, Still Slow: 6 in 10 of Those Sites Have a Fast Server and No Edge

534 WordPress sites hold a cache hit and still take over 400ms. On 227, Google clocks the server at 21ms, so the slow byte is distance, not the host.

 Oct 12, 2026 · 17 min read 

xSpeed Cache and Cloudflare: Cloudflare Enterprise, your whole WordPress site served from the edge, shown as a globe where edge locations across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia each serve their nearest visitors

Release NotesCloudflare

What's New in xSpeed Cache Free v1.4.1 and Pro v1.3.1

xSpeed Cache Pro v1.3.1 and Free v1.4.1 add Cloudflare Enterprise: whole pages served from Cloudflare's edge, four-step setup, no Cloudflare account needed.

 Oct 11, 2026 · 8 min read 

Cover reading "Two gates between WordPress and the edge" with the Cloudflare, WordPress and xSpeed Cache logos and three numbered steps

CloudflareCDN

Two Gates Refuse Your WordPress HTML at the Cloudflare Edge, and the Free Plan Clears Both

Cloudflare caches 56 file extensions and HTML is not one. A rule fixes that gate. We measured how many WordPress sites then hit a second one they never see coming.

 Oct 11, 2026 · 10 min read 

Dark xSpeed Cache cover headed "Three options for failure, or twelve", with name chips for Redis Object Cache and Object Cache Pro either side of a VS badge.

Object CacheRedis

Redis Object Cache Has Three Options for Failure. Object Cache Pro Has Twelve, for $950 a Year.

Both reach Redis the same ways. We counted every documented option in each: 12 of Object Cache Pro's 49 handle failure, against 3 of the free drop-in's 31.

 Oct 10, 2026 · 21 min read 

xSpeed Cache cover reading "The object cache stops at the entry plan", with name chips for Hostinger and Namecheap and the figure 519 of 539 sites on a host with no entry-plan object cache

Object CacheHosting

Five of Seven Hosts Document No Entry-Plan Object Cache, and 519 of the 539 Sites in Our 2026 Census Are on Them

We resolved 2,139 WordPress domains to their hosts, then read each host's own documentation. The object cache stops one plan above the one most people buy.

 Oct 9, 2026 · 18 min read 

CachingTroubleshooting

A Form Stopped Submitting After You Enabled Caching, and the Nonce Is Usually Innocent

A WordPress nonce expires on a shared clock at midnight and noon UTC, not on your page's schedule. Three causes break a cached form, and the famous one is rarest.

 Oct 8, 2026 · 6 min read 

Release NotesxSpeed Cache

xSpeed Cache September 2026 Release Recap

38 releases, 261 merged pull requests, 107 resolved issues. Everything new, improved and fixed in xSpeed Cache, Pro and Hub in September 2026.

 Oct 7, 2026 · 11 min read 

Render BlockingPerformance

Fix Render-Blocking CSS and JavaScript in 2026: WordPress Asks for Defer on Two of Its Own 190 Scripts

WordPress gives scripts a dependency-aware defer API and stylesheets nothing. Read the attribute core leaves when it refuses your deferral, and fix the dependent.

 Oct 7, 2026 · 10 min read 

xSpeed Cache cover reading "Year one is the cheapest year" with the subtitle "The renewal rule decides the bill, not the price tag", beside three-year cost bars of $49 for WP Fastest Cache, $179.85 for WP Rocket Single and $297 for W3 Total Cache Pro, a "7 of 9" stat, and the WP Fastest Cache, WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache logos.

PricingCost

Nine Caching Licences, Three Years: The Cheapest in 2026 Is Fourth by 2029

Nine WordPress caching licences priced to year three from each vendor's own page. The renewal rule reorders the field, and the two biggest movers are ours.

 Oct 6, 2026 · 23 min read 

xSpeed Cache milestone animation: an install gauge sweeps from 0 to 10K active installations, with a Milestone Unlocked badge

xSpeed CacheWordPress Caching

xSpeed Cache Hits 10,000+ Active Installs: Thank You for Making xSpeed Cache WordPress's Fastest-Growing AI-Native Caching Plugin

xSpeed Cache has crossed 10,000+ active installations on WordPress.org. Thank you to every site owner who trusted us, and see how the plugin keeps growing and what it can do for your website.

 Oct 5, 2026 · 9 min read 

FontsCore Web Vitals

Google Fonts Tuned Right Still Trails Self-Hosting by 1.9 Seconds

We measured web font delivery on 1,186 WordPress sites. The gate every guide leads with changed nothing we could detect, and the one Google hedges on was the largest gap.

 Oct 5, 2026 · 18 min read 

xSpeed Cache cover reading "Did the edge really answer? Two headers, two requests, one real URL", with Cloudflare, bunny.net and WordPress logos and three numbered steps: send a GET twice, read the status word, then read Age.

CDNCloudflare

Prove the Edge Is Answering in 2026: One Response Can Report a Cache Hit and DYNAMIC at the Same Time

A CDN in front of WordPress does not mean the edge serves your HTML. Two headers, two requests, and the one word that says whose fault an uncached page is.

 Oct 4, 2026 · 10 min read 

Make your site load in milliseconds.

One switch. Zero bloat. Always free to start.

Try xSpeed Cache ⚡ View pricing