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Free vs. Pro: What's Included

5 min read

xSpeed Cache comes in two tiers: the free plugin from WordPress.org and xSpeed Cache Pro, a paid add-on from WPDeveloper. This guide explains what each one includes so you can decide what you need.

What this does

The free plugin handles full-site caching and performance on its own. xSpeed Cache Pro is a separate add-on that installs alongside the free plugin and adds extra modules through the same dashboard.

You always install the free plugin first. Pro hooks into it and adds its panels when its license is active.

How the two tiers work together

xSpeed Cache Pro doesn’t replace the free plugin. It runs next to it.

  • The free plugin provides the core caching engine, the dashboard, and all the free modules.
  • When xSpeed Cache Pro is installed and reports a compatible version, the free plugin marks the site as Pro and unlocks the Pro panels.
  • Without an active Pro license, Pro modules still appear as locked rows in the sidebar so you can see what they offer, but their panels show an activation prompt instead of the real controls.

What the free plugin includes

The free plugin is a full-site performance plugin. These features are built into it.

Caching

  • Page caching with static-file serving (the fast path that bypasses PHP on a cache hit)
  • Mobile cache (a separate cache for phone and tablet visitors)
  • Browser caching with Cache-Control and Expires headers
  • GZIP compression
  • Cache lifetime / TTL setting
  • URL and cookie exclusions, with tracked-cookie and cache-variant support
  • Smart cache purge (auto-purge on publish, update, comment, and theme change)
  • REST API response caching with its own TTL
  • Private cache and logged-in / commenter cache controls
  • WooCommerce settings and user-agent bypass
  • Per-post overrides: don’t-cache a post, or give it a custom expiry

Cache preloading

  • Automatic cache preloading with a sitemap crawler and batch size control
  • Priority URLs and preload exclusions
  • Scheduled preloading with frequency, time, and day controls
  • Email notifications
  • Hover-prefetch (preload links)
  • Auto-warm on publish and on approved comments

Object cache

  • Enable object caching with Redis or Memcached
  • Connection settings, cache key prefix, timeout, and persistent connections

Performance

  • Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
  • Combine CSS and JavaScript files
  • Load CSS asynchronously
  • Defer and delay JavaScript
  • Remove query strings, plus CSS and JS exclusions
  • Remove emoji scripts
  • HTTP/2 Server Push and HTTP/3 support
  • Lazy load for images, iframes, and videos, with native lazy loading, missing-dimension fixes, responsive placeholders, YouTube lazy loading, and exclusions
  • Fonts: font preloading and font optimization
  • Heartbeat control with behavior, frequency, and scope settings

Disable Bloat

  • Disable dashicons on the frontend
  • Disable oEmbed / wp-embed.min.js
  • Disable RSS feeds
  • Disable XML-RPC
  • Strip jQuery Migrate on the frontend
  • Restrict the REST API to logged-in users
  • DNS prefetch, preconnect, and custom prefetch domains

Image conversion

  • WebP detection, including for CSS background images

Network

  • CDN: enable a CDN URL with include and exclude rules (wildcards supported)
  • Cloudflare: connect your zone, auto-purge on update, and toggle development mode

Insights and tools

  • Health: cache performance and a last-24-hours performance chart
  • Multisite, WPML, Apache, nginx, Varnish, OPcache, and WP-CLI support
  • Setup wizard, debug mode and logs, import/export config, and version rollback
  • Database cleanup: post revisions, spam, trash, expired transients, auto-drafts, orphan metadata, and table optimization, with custom scheduling
  • Migration: one-click import of settings from another caching plugin
  • Help & Support: a support link and a read-only system snapshot

AI

  • AI Privacy: a GDPR mode off-switch that AI features must check before recording visitor data

What xSpeed Cache Pro adds

xSpeed Cache Pro adds modules on top of the free plugin. The features below are the ones confirmed to do real work in the Pro modules.

  • Critical CSS — generates critical CSS.
  • Unused CSS — removes unused CSS, with a local used-CSS extractor (no remote service).
  • Image Conversion (Pro) — AVIF image format, WebP/AVIF for extra srcset widths, and automatic format negotiation based on the browser’s Accept header.
  • Real-User Monitoring — collects real-user Core Web Vitals metrics (LCP, INP, CLS, FCP, TTFB).
  • PageSpeed — PageSpeed Insights integration.
  • SmartPredict — predictive navigation prefetching.
  • Performance Health — a Pro performance health module.
  • Recommendations — auto-tuned cache rules and related suggestions.
  • Custom Cache Rules — conditional, if-then cache rules.
  • Migration (agency extras) — profile-based imports and host-tuned profiles on top of the free one-click migration.
  • White Label — rebrand the dashboard (name, logo) and hide xSpeed Cache branding.
  • Network — a multi-site network dashboard with per-site override controls.

Note: Some Pro panels are still being built out. xSpeed Cache Pro ships panels for features whose logic is not yet wired up, and a number of advertised Pro capabilities are planned rather than finished. The list above is limited to Pro features confirmed to do real work, so what you see in a given Pro release may differ.

Which one should I use?

If you want a faster site without paying anything, the free plugin is a complete caching and performance plugin on its own. It handles page caching, minification, compression, lazy loading, fonts, object cache, CDN, database cleanup, and migration.

Choose xSpeed Cache Pro if you also want critical and unused CSS, deeper image optimization, real-user monitoring, PageSpeed reporting, agency tools like white-label and a multisite network dashboard, or custom cache rules.

Best practices

  • Set up and tune the free plugin first. Confirm caching works and your site looks correct before adding Pro modules.
  • Keep both the free plugin and xSpeed Cache Pro updated, since Pro relies on a compatible version of the free plugin to load.
  • What is xSpeed Cache?
  • A Tour of the xSpeed Cache Dashboard
  • The Setup Wizard
  • Installing and Activating xSpeed Cache