A tour of the xSpeed dashboard

Getting Started 7 min

Three regions — a navigation rail, a persistent top bar, and the panel. Where everything lives, what the top bar does, and why there is no Save button.

The whole plugin lives on one WordPress admin page. Click xSpeed Cache in the left menu and a single-page app takes over the screen, splitting it three ways: a navigation rail down the left, a top bar that never changes, and the panel you’re working in.

What this does

Around fifty modules would be an unusable list if they were presented as one. The dashboard’s job is to make them findable: the rail groups them by what they do, the top bar keeps the site’s headline state and its one loud action in reach from every screen, and every screen has its own address so you can link straight to it.

Learn those three regions and you can find anything in the plugin without remembering where it lives.

Settings save automatically as you change them — there is no Save button to forget. A small toast appears bottom-centre — a spinner while it writes, a green check when it’s stored, red if it failed.

That removes the most common way to lose a configuration, and introduces exactly one thing to be careful about: a change is a change, including an accidental one. There is no confirm step on an ordinary setting and nothing to abandon by navigating away, so a stray click writes.

Two practical consequences. A browser tab left open on a settings panel is live — it can still write when it regains focus, and the change is recorded as coming via dashboard, so a change nobody remembers making is often a tab somebody left open. And everything is logged: settings changes and purges both land in the activity log with their old and new values and how the change was made, which is the fastest answer to “when did this change, and what did it?”

The page cache master switch is the one exception — switching it off opens a confirm popover, and so does switching it on when that would take over another plugin’s cache file, because both are site-wide changes rather than one module’s setting.

The Overview page

Overview is pinned to the top of the rail and is where the dashboard opens. Nothing on it is a setting — every number is a reading, and every button sends you to the panel that owns it. It holds:

Your speed score — Lighthouse performance from your most recent site scan, with a mobile / desktop toggle and the age of the reading.
Hub and AI connection — whether this site is connected for remote management, and whether an AI agent can reach it over MCP.
Four cache metrics — hit ratio over the last 24 hours, cached pages, cache size on disk, and average saving per request.
Recommended for your site — a ranked, rule-based read of your current configuration, each entry with a button that opens the panel that fixes it.
Your setup and Recent activity — which features are on, off or licence-locked, and the latest settings changes and purges.

How to read your dashboard covers all of it in detail.

Seven groups sit below Overview. Clicking one opens its landing page — a grid of cards, one per module — rather than dropping you straight into settings, so you see what a group contains before choosing.

Each group row carries a small number on the right: how many of its modules are currently on. Hover it and the tooltip names the unit — “3 of 6 modules on” — because the bare figure could otherwise be read as a count of settings, which is a very different number. The rail collapses to icons, and the tooltip picks up the counts so nothing is lost.

Overview

The landing page above; not a group.

Cache

Page, object and browser caching, plus preload.

Page Cache, Preloader, Browser Cache, Object Cache
Advanced Cache — 404, search, feed and REST coverage, custom rules and maintenance bypass
Adaptive Cache (Pro)

Optimization

Minify, compress, lazy-load, fonts and hints.

CSS & JavaScript — minify, combine, defer, delay, async
Compression — GZIP, with Brotli as a Pro tab
Media Optimization — lazy loading, with image formats as a Pro tab
Resource Hints, Fonts, Bloat Control, Heartbeat

Network

CDN and Cloudflare edge delivery.

CDN — pull-zone rewriting for images, fonts, CSS and JS
Cloudflare — zone connection, edge purge and dev mode

Health & insights

Speed score, diagnostics and analytics.

Health — diagnostics, hit ratio and recent cache activity, with Visitors and PageSpeed as Pro tabs
Speed Test — a full graded site scan, plus PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix audits with history

Tools

Database cleanup, migration and logs.

Database — scan and clean revisions, spam, transients and orphan meta
Migration — import settings from WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or LiteSpeed Cache
Logs — the most recent 50 settings changes and purges

AI & agents

Hub, MCP access, AI provider and privacy.

AI Provider (Pro) — the OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or OpenRouter connection that powers the AI features
MCP Server — lets Claude and other agents purge, tune and benchmark this site
AI Privacy — whether AI features may collect anything from your visitors

Settings

Licence, branding, multisite and support.

License (Pro), Branding (Pro), Multisite (Pro)
Help & Support — opens a ticket with a system snapshot already attached

At the very bottom of the rail sits a licence row with three states, and they are not three styles of the same button: Upgrade to Pro when Pro isn’t installed, Activate License when it is but has no key, and Pro Licensed when everything is in order. Only the first is selling anything.

The top bar

It rides every screen, so whatever you’re configuring, the site’s headline state and its one destructive action are always one click away.

Breadcrumb — names the current page, with a back chip to its group. The chip only appears on module pages.
Search (⌘K, or Ctrl K on Windows and Linux) — opens the command palette. Jump to any module or individual setting by name, and run Purge all or Preload from it.
Caching — the master page-cache switch, showing its current state.
Purge all — clears the cache now. The one loud action.
Hub chip and theme toggle — reads Connect Hub or Hub connected, and switches between light and dark. The theme preference is stored per user.

Two things about that bar are deliberate.

The Caching control shows state first and is a control second. A plain “Enable caching” button would claim to do something without ever telling you what is currently true — which is exactly the problem it was added to fix, since the master switch used to be buried on one screen and invisible on every other. The label plus the switch answer is caching on? from anywhere. Turning it on applies immediately — unless it would replace another plugin’s page-cache file, in which case it names the owner and asks first. Turning it off always asks you to confirm, because a stray click on a control that follows you around every screen should not silently deoptimise the whole site.

Preload is not up there, on purpose. It is a crawler that runs for minutes with its own progress display on its own page, so a button beside Purge all would read as its peer while behaving nothing like one. It stays reachable from the Preloader page and the ⌘K palette.

How panels are built

A panel is rendered from the module’s own settings schema, so the controls you see are the settings that actually exist — including the ones that appear only when another is set a certain way. Choose GTmetrix as your speed-test provider and the PageSpeed API key field is replaced by the GTmetrix one, while the mobile/desktop Strategy control disappears entirely, because that field belongs to PageSpeed Insights alone. Switch Cloudflare’s authentication from an API token to a global key and the token field gives way to an email and key pair.

These chains collapse from the root: turn Cloudflare’s master switch off and every field beneath it goes at once, rather than leaving you an authentication method to configure for a module that isn’t running.

Some modules replace the generated form with a purpose-built panel where a plain list of fields wouldn’t do the job — Health, Preloader, Cloudflare, Object Cache, the database cleaner, the migration importer, the MCP connection and Speed Test all have one.

A few settings can also come from your host. The Object Cache connection fields read wp-config.php constants such as WP_REDIS_HOST, and a field set that way shows as read-only and names its constant, with a pencil to manage it from the dashboard instead. How to enable Redis or Memcached covers it — in this release, no other panel works that way.

Where a module hosts several related features they appear as tabs across the top — the Speed Test panel, for example, has xSpeed Scan and Speed test tabs — and each tab has its own address, so you can bookmark or share it.

Some of those tabs and cards belong to Pro. Without a licence they are still visible but locked — you see the feature’s name, icon and a short description of what it does, with no settings and no form. That is how the free plugin lets you see what Pro adds without installing anything, and it is why a panel can appear to have a tab you can’t open. Free vs Pro — what’s included lists which are which.

The admin bar and live stats

xSpeed also adds an xSpeed Cache item to the WordPress admin bar, visible on every admin screen and on the front end, for administrators only. Its submenu starts with the errands you reach for most, then one entry per cache type you actually have running:

Settings — opens the dashboard
Purge All — always present, and always sweeps everything
Purge this URL on a page you’re viewing, or Purge this post while editing — clears just that page, or the post and the pages that list it
Purge Page / Static Cache — always present
Purge CSS / JS Cache — only when minification is on
Purge Object Cache — only when a persistent object cache is configured
Purge REST Cache

Pro modules add their own entries to the same menu. The single-post purge also appears as Purge cache in the row links of your Posts and Pages lists — How to enable Page Cache has the details.

The parent item itself does not purge — it opens the dashboard. It used to wipe the entire cache instantly on click, with no confirmation, which is far too destructive for a control sitting in the admin bar of every page you visit. Purging is still one click away, but it is now always an explicit choice of what to purge.

The live stats sit on the Page Cache panel rather than in the admin bar: four cards — Cached pages, Cache size, Last purge and Hit ratio · 24h. They load with the dashboard and update as soon as you purge or switch caching from it; they don’t tick over on a timer. Open a card for the detail behind its number — the cached pages themselves, where the cache size goes, or the purge history, each with its own Refresh — or the hit ratio behind the percentage.

Best practices

Use the command palette (⌘K) to jump straight to a setting instead of scrolling. It searches individual settings, not just module names, so you can reach a single checkbox without knowing which panel owns it.
Read the group landing page before opening a card. It shows what the group contains and what’s already on, which is usually faster than opening panels to find out.
Check the activity log first when something changed unexpectedly. Auto-save means changes happen without a confirm step, and the log records every one with its old and new value.

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