xSpeed Cache Blog

Speed Up Your WordPress Sites

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

Search Console Flagged Your LCP the Week You Turned On Caching, and Its Window Is 28 Days Wide Oct 15, 2026 Only 8% of WordPress Pages Lazy-Load Their Hero. 21% Send the Priority Hint More Than Once. Oct 14, 2026 Four of Six Managed Hosts Answer the Caching-Plugin Question With a Caching Plugin Oct 13, 2026 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

The LCP alert reports 28 days, not your deploy: Search Console flagged LCP the week you turned on caching

Core Web VitalsPageSpeed

Search Console Flagged Your LCP the Week You Turned On Caching, and Its Window Is 28 Days Wide

Search Console's LCP figure covers the previous 28 days, so a cache enabled last week is rarely the cause. How to date the window and find the real change.

 Oct 15, 2026 · 7 min read 

Cover reading "One eager hero, one priority hint", with the WordPress and xSpeed Cache logos and three steps: count your fetchpriority hints, make the hero eager, preload=none on video.

Lazy LoadImages

Only 8% of WordPress Pages Lazy-Load Their Hero. 21% Send the Priority Hint More Than Once.

2,083 WordPress homepages read on 14 October 2026. Just 172 lazy-load the first image. 444 send two or more fetchpriority=high, and 146 send three or more.

 Oct 14, 2026 · 10 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 

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 

PerformanceTutorial

Speed Up WordPress Before the Caching Plugin: Core 7.1 Already Prefetches and Lazy-Loads, and Two Gates Switch It Off

WordPress 7.1.2 ships four loading optimisations that once needed a plugin. Two are gated on settings most sites get wrong, and the gates are in the core source.

 Oct 4, 2026 · 10 min read 

PerformanceCore Web Vitals

Fix the Bytes First: Only 86 of 1,270 WordPress Sites Have a Clean Server, and 66 of Those Still Fail Mobile LCP

Eight first-party studies ranked into one fix order, plus a fresh count of how often each fix is even available. Page weight is open on 92% of sites.

 Oct 4, 2026 · 18 min read 

The font arrives late and the text jumps, xSpeed cover

PerformanceCore Web Vitals

The Font Arrives Late and the Text Jumps: Swap Does That by Design

Turning on font optimization trades invisible text for shifted text, by specification. Two variables tell you which symptom you have, and the fix differs for each.

 Oct 2, 2026 · 7 min read 

Mobile vs desktop: the gap that misleads, xSpeed cover

Core Web VitalsMobile

The Smallest Score Gap Was the Worst News: Triaging 1,110 WordPress Speed Reports Graded on Two Devices in 2026

1,110 WordPress pages graded on desktop and mobile on 30 September 2026. The letter grade differed on 61.6%, and 8 of 19 checks never moved at all.

 Sep 30, 2026 · 14 min read 

Core Web VitalsPerformance

The 350 KB Cliff: Where Page Weight Starts Deciding Mobile LCP on 912 WordPress Sites in 2026

912 WordPress sites measured on 27 September 2026. Transfer weight predicts mobile LCP better than our own lab score does, and the threshold that matters is 350 KB.

 Sep 27, 2026 · 18 min read 

Pass Lighthouse, fail Google, with the Lighthouse and Google logos, xSpeed cover

Core Web VitalsPerformance

45% of the WordPress Sites Our Scan Calls Clean Are Failing Google in 2026: Lab Scores Against Field Data

353 WordPress hosts carry both a lab verdict and Google field data on 26 September 2026. The two disagree on a third of them, and the clean label holds 67% of the time.

 Sep 26, 2026 · 18 min read 

PerformanceCore Web Vitals

Every Image Is WebP and the Page Weight Did Not Move: Format Saved 38%, Pixels Saved 93%

Twelve photographs, measured on 25 September 2026. Converting to WebP saved a median 38.4%. Resizing the same files saved 92.8%. Why dimensions beat format.

 Sep 25, 2026 · 7 min read 

How to read a PageSpeed report, with the Lighthouse and Google logos, xSpeed cover

PageSpeedCore Web Vitals

Reading a PageSpeed Report in 2026: 30% of the Score Is a Metric Google Does Not Rank You On

Total Blocking Time is 30% of a PageSpeed score and is not a Core Web Vital. INP is a Core Web Vital and is 0% of the score. Which number to read first.

 Sep 24, 2026 · 10 min read 

Make your site load in milliseconds.

One switch. Zero bloat. Always free to start.

Try xSpeed Cache ⚡ View pricing