Free vs Pro — what's included

Getting Started 8 min

The complete split, taken from the module registry: 22 modules in the free plugin, 27 more in Pro, and the ones people most often guess wrong.

xSpeed ships as two plugins. The free one on WordPress.org holds the page cache and most of the optimisation stack — 22 modules. xSpeed Cache Pro is a separate add-on that adds 27 more inside the same dashboard.

The lists below are taken from the module registry rather than from a marketing table, so where this page disagrees with a feature comparison you’ve read elsewhere, this is the one that matches what the plugin actually does.

What this does

The free plugin handles full-site caching and performance on its own. It is not a trial, a limited edition, or a version with features held back — the page cache in Free is the whole page cache, and a site running only the free plugin is a fully cached, fully optimised site.

xSpeed Cache Pro is a separate add-on for the work that sits on top of that: rendering critical CSS, converting image formats, measuring real visitors over time, and caching request types the free plugin leaves alone.

How the two tiers work together

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

Free must stay installed and active. Pro reads the module registry and settings framework the free plugin provides, and does nothing without it.
Install Free first, then Pro. Pro is a ZIP from your WPDeveloper account; the free plugin comes from the WordPress.org directory.
There is one dashboard, not two. Pro modules appear as new cards in the groups you already use, and as new tabs and sections inside panels you already have open.
Five Pro modules get their own card — Adaptive Cache, AI Provider, License, Branding and Multisite. The rest are embedded in a Free host panel.
Before the licence is entered, Pro features are locked, not hidden. You see the name, icon and a one-line description of what each does, with no settings and no form. Nothing is active, nothing collects data, and no outbound request is made.

That last point is why a panel can appear to have a tab you can’t open — it’s deliberate, so you can see what Pro adds without installing anything.

What the free plugin includes

Caching

Page caching with static-file serving, and the server rewrite that skips PHP entirely
Cache lifetime from 1 to 720 hours
URL, cookie and user-agent exclusions, plus ignored query parameters
Separate mobile cache for phone and tablet visitors
Per-post cache overrides — custom expiry, or caching off for one post
Automatic purging on publish, update, comment and theme change
Purge shortcuts in the WordPress admin bar, per cache type — plus one-click purge of a single page or post

Cache preloading

Sitemap crawling to warm pages before visitors reach them
Warm new content immediately on publish, and optionally re-warm after comments
Manual and scheduled runs, with a configurable batch size

Object cache

Persistent Redis or Memcached object cache, with a generated wp-config.php snippet
Host, port, credentials, database index, key prefix, timeout and persistent connections

Performance

Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Combine CSS and JavaScript files
Defer JavaScript, or delay it until the first interaction, with exclusion lists
Async CSS loading, and removal of ?ver= query strings
GZIP compression
Lazy-load images, iframes and HTML5 video, with a click-to-play video facade
Eager-load the first N images so your LCP isn’t deferred, and add missing image dimensions
Preload the LCP image and preconnect to font hosts
font-display: swap on Google Fonts, and preloading for fonts you mark critical
Browser cache headers — a year for static assets, an hour for HTML
Heartbeat control, per context

Disable Bloat

Dashicons on the front end, oEmbed discovery and wp-embed.min.js, RSS feeds, XML-RPC, jQuery Migrate
Restrict the REST API to logged-in users

Image conversion

Not part of the free plugin. Converting images to WebP and AVIF, and serving them — including images used as CSS backgrounds — is the Pro Image Optimization module. The free plugin controls how images load, under Performance above.

Network

CDN rewriting for images, fonts, CSS and JS, with included extensions and exclusion patterns
Cloudflare zone connection by API token or global key, automatic edge purging, and development mode

Insights and tools

Health diagnostics, hit ratio and recent cache activity
A full graded site scan across four weighted areas, with ranked fixes
PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix audits, with run history — including a monthly allowance of free GTmetrix tests through xSpeed Hub, no API key needed
Database cleanup — revisions, spam, transients, orphaned meta, table optimization
Settings import from WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed Cache
An activity log of every settings change and purge, with old and new values
Help & Support — opens a ticket with a system snapshot already attached

AI

An MCP server, so Claude and other agents can purge, tune and benchmark the site
AI Privacy — the switch governing whether any AI feature may collect data from your visitors

What xSpeed Cache Pro adds

⚠️ Image conversion is Pro, including WebP. This is the single most commonly mis-stated line in the split, so it’s worth being exact: the free Media Optimization module controls how images load — lazy-loading, eager-loading the first few, adding missing dimensions, video facades. Converting to and serving WebP and AVIF belongs to the Pro Image Optimization module, which appears as a locked tab of that same panel. Neither format is free.

💡 Advanced Cache is a Free card whose every tab is Pro. All three — What to cache, Feeds & API, Rules & bypass — are licence-locked. The module is registered in Free so the card exists and you can read what each tab does, but on a free install there is nothing there to configure.

Critical CSS — inline above-the-fold CSS and defer the rest, built automatically as visitors reach each page
Unused CSS — replace each run of adjacent stylesheets with its pruned equivalent, built automatically and rebuilt when your theme or plugins change
Image Optimization — convert uploads to WebP and AVIF, and serve them to capable browsers
Smart Image — AI-recommended format and quality settings for your library
Brotli Compression — smaller than GZIP, falling back to GZIP automatically
404 Caching — one shared cached 404 so scanner floods don’t each trigger a full render
Search Caching — cache /?s=… results, keyed per term
Feed Caching — cache RSS, Atom and comment feeds
REST API Cache — cache read-only REST responses with a per-route TTL
Custom Cache Rules — bypass or override expiry by URL, post type, category, tag or author
Maintenance — skip caching in maintenance mode and auto-purge when the site goes live
Adaptive Cache — AI-tuned cache lifetime from 24-hour traffic patterns, applied in one click
Scheduled Prewarming — warm target URLs ahead of a launch, sale or campaign
Predictive Warming — proactively warm the hottest URLs, ranked by real traffic and recency
SmartPredict — prefetch the visitor’s likely next page using Chrome’s Speculation Rules API
Real-User Monitoring — sample LCP, FCP, CLS, INP and TTFB from real visitors
Performance Health — Core Web Vitals thresholds, a composite score and regression against a 7-day baseline
PageSpeed — Google PageSpeed Insights audits from the dashboard, cached 24 hours
Analytics — hit-ratio trends and slowest URLs
Recommendations — configuration changes that would speed the site up, with one-click apply
Cloudflare APO — Automatic Platform Optimization, edge cache level and TTL on your connected zone
Advanced Migration — settings profiles, plus export and import
AI Provider — the OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or OpenRouter connection powering every Pro AI feature
Branding — white-label the dashboard name, footer credit and help links
Multisite — the network-level dashboard for managing every site at once

Which one should I use?

Start with Free, and stay there if it’s enough. For most sites — a blog, a brochure site, a small shop — the free plugin is the whole job. Page caching, minification, compression, lazy loading, browser cache headers and a CDN cover the large wins, and the remaining gains are smaller than the first one by a wide margin.

Pro earns its place in three situations. If your Core Web Vitals are held back by render-blocking CSS, Critical CSS and Unused CSS address that directly and nothing in Free does. If images are your page weight, WebP and AVIF conversion is the single biggest reduction available. And if you’re responsible for a site over time rather than setting it up once, Real-User Monitoring and Performance Health tell you when something regressed, which no one-off audit can.

A few things that sound like Pro are already Free: the object cache, cache preloading, the Cloudflare connection with edge purge, the full site scan, PageSpeed and GTmetrix audits, database cleanup, and the MCP server. Check the list above before upgrading for something you already have.

Best practices

Install and configure the free plugin first, and keep the two updated together. Pro does nothing on its own, and each Pro release is built against the free release that ships beside it — xSpeed Cache Pro 1.2.0 alongside xSpeed Cache 1.3.0. You also want a working cache to measure against before adding anything on top.
Enter the licence key before judging Pro. Without it every Pro module renders locked, which looks identical to a feature that isn’t working.
Turn Pro features on one at a time. Critical CSS, Unused CSS and SmartPredict all change how the page is delivered; enabling them together makes a regression impossible to attribute.

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