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A Tour of the xSpeed Cache Dashboard

5 min read

The xSpeed Cache dashboard is where you control every feature. This guide walks through the admin menu, the sidebar groups, and what each area is for, so you can find any setting quickly.

What this does

xSpeed Cache adds a single xSpeed Cache item to your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking it opens the dashboard, a single-page interface with its own sidebar that groups every feature into clear sections.

Settings save automatically as you change them. There is no Save button to forget.

Finding xSpeed Cache in WordPress

After activation, look for xSpeed Cache in your WordPress admin sidebar (with its own icon). Clicking the top-level item opens the dashboard.

Under that top-level item, xSpeed Cache adds shortcut links that jump straight to a section of the dashboard:

  • Cache
  • Performance
  • Network
  • Insights
  • Tools
  • AI
  • Pro Add-ons

It also adds a Setup Wizard link so you can re-run onboarding any time. These WordPress submenu links mirror the dashboard’s own sidebar groups, so the menu reads as the same map as the in-app sidebar.

Note: If you use an agency white-label build, the menu name and icon may be different. The structure stays the same.

The dashboard sidebar groups

Inside the dashboard, features are organized into groups. The groups can be collapsed for cleaner navigation, and there is a settings search across the whole dashboard with keyword highlighting.

Here is what each group is for and which panels live in it.

Cache

The core caching tools. This is where you turn caching on and tune how it behaves.

  • Cache — the main page-cache panel: master toggle, status, live stats, cache lifetime, URL and cookie exclusions, mobile cache, and purge controls.
  • Preloader — warms your cache automatically so the first visitor after a purge still gets a fast page. Includes a sitemap crawler, priority URLs, scheduling, and auto-warm on publish.
  • Browser Cache — sets Cache-Control and Expires headers so returning visitors load static files faster.
  • Object Cache — connects Redis or Memcached to speed up database-heavy sites, with status and flush controls.

Performance

Front-end optimization: shrinking code and deferring assets.

  • Minify — minify and combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, defer and delay JavaScript, load CSS asynchronously, and remove query strings.
  • GZIP — compresses files before the server sends them.
  • Lazy Load — defers images, iframes, and videos until they scroll into view, with a layout-shift fix and a native-lazy-loading option.
  • Fonts — adds font-display: swap and can preload above-the-fold fonts.
  • Disable Bloat — switches off unused WordPress features like dashicons, oEmbed, RSS, and XML-RPC, plus DNS prefetch and preconnect controls.
  • Heartbeat — throttles the WordPress Heartbeat API to reduce admin-ajax load, with scope controls.
  • Image Conversion — WebP detection, including for CSS background images.

Network

Tools for serving and purging content beyond your own server.

  • CDN — rewrites static-asset URLs to a CDN, with include and exclude rules.
  • Cloudflare — connect your zone, auto-purge on update, and toggle development mode.

Insights

Where you see how your cache is performing and check your environment.

  • Health — cache performance, a last-24-hours hit/miss chart, your environment snapshot, and server support details (Apache, nginx, multisite, WP-CLI, and more).

Tools

Maintenance and migration utilities.

  • Database — clean post revisions, spam, trash, expired transients, auto-drafts, and orphaned metadata, optimize tables, and schedule automatic cleanup.
  • Migration — detect a competing caching plugin and import its settings so you can switch over without starting from scratch.
  • Help & Support — a support link and a read-only system snapshot for diagnostics.

AI

xSpeed Cache reserves an AI group in the sidebar.

  • AI Privacy — a GDPR off-switch that AI features must check before recording any visitor data. This is part of the free plugin.

Note: Other items in the AI group are Pro features. They appear as locked rows on the free plugin to show what Pro offers. See Free vs. Pro: What’s Included.

Pro Add-ons

A group for xSpeed Cache Pro modules. On the free plugin this group shows locked rows with an upgrade prompt. The panels become active only when xSpeed Cache Pro is installed and licensed.

Note: The sidebar always has these seven groups, in this order: Cache, Performance, Network, Insights, Tools, AI, and Pro Add-ons. The exact set of panels inside each group depends on which modules are active on your install and whether xSpeed Cache Pro is present, so your dashboard may show more or fewer rows than listed here.

How panels are built

Each feature is a self-contained module. xSpeed Cache reads the active modules and renders one sidebar row and one settings panel for each module that has settings to show. This is why your sidebar reflects exactly what is installed and licensed.

When you have a Pro feature that you haven’t licensed, the row stays visible in the sidebar so you can see what it does, but the panel shows an activation prompt instead of the real controls.

The admin bar and live stats

xSpeed Cache adds an xSpeed Cache menu to your WordPress admin bar, so you can clear the cache from any page. It holds the purge options, starting with Purge All. The Cache panel shows live stats like cached pages, cache size, and last purge.

Best practices

  • Use the dashboard search to jump straight to a setting instead of scrolling.
  • Check the Health panel after enabling caching to confirm the fast static-rewrite path is active.
  • Collapse groups you don’t use often to keep the sidebar tidy.
  • What is xSpeed Cache?
  • The Setup Wizard
  • Free vs. Pro: What’s Included
  • Installing and Activating xSpeed Cache