How to check your site health
One page that tells you whether caching is actually working — hit ratio, server diagnostics, and a rule-based list of the changes most likely to help.
Every other panel in xSpeed changes something. Health is where you find out whether any of it worked. It reports your real hit ratio, checks the plumbing caching depends on, and produces a ranked list of what to fix next.
Where to find it
- In your WordPress admin, click xSpeed Cache in the left menu.
- In the xSpeed Cache sidebar, open the Health & insights group.
- Click the Health card.
Shortcut: open
wp-admin/admin.php?page=xspeed#/insights/healthdirectly.✅ This panel is part of xSpeed Cache (Free).
Tabs on this panel
| Tab | Feature | Tier | Guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overview | Hit ratio, server diagnostics, config snippets | Free | How to read your cache diagnostics |
| Visitors | Real-user monitoring from actual page loads | ⭐ Pro | How to measure real visitor speed |
| PageSpeed | Google PageSpeed Insights audits | ⭐ Pro | How to run a PageSpeed audit |
Each tab has its own address, so you can link straight to one:
| Tab | URL |
|---|---|
| Overview | #/insights/health |
| Visitors | #/insights/health/visitors |
| PageSpeed | #/insights/health/pagespeed |
The summary bar
- Summary — five numbers covering the state of your cache.
Above the tabs, five figures summarise everything — and unlike the rest of the panel they stay put when you switch tabs, so the headline numbers are visible whichever view you’re in:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Hit ratio | Share of requests served from cache. The headline number. |
| Cache coverage | How many of xSpeed’s cache features are switched on. |
| Cached pages | How many pages currently have a saved copy. |
| Cache size | Disk space those pages occupy. |
| Requests (24h) | Total hits plus misses in the last day. |
Hit ratio and cache coverage answer different questions, and it’s worth not confusing them. Hit ratio is about outcomes — are visitors actually being served from cache? Coverage is about configuration — how much of the toolkit you’ve enabled. A site can have 99% hit ratio on 75% coverage, which simply means the features you turned on are working well and there are more available.
💡 What counts as a good hit ratio? 80% or better is healthy for most sites. Very high figures usually mean steady traffic to a stable set of pages rather than anything you configured especially well — and a low figure on a site with lots of unique, rarely-repeated URLs isn’t necessarily a fault either.
Which one should you use?
The three tabs measure speed from different vantage points, and they disagree for good reasons.
| Overview | Visitors | PageSpeed | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data source | Your server’s own counters | Real visitors’ browsers | Google’s test lab |
| Answers | Is caching working? | How fast is it for real people? | What would Google score me? |
| Needs | Nothing | The RUM beacon on, plus traffic | A URL, optionally an API key |
| Tier | Free | ⭐ Pro | ⭐ Pro |
Start with Overview — it needs nothing and tells you whether the fundamentals are in place.
Visitors is the truest measure of experience, because it records what actually happened on real devices and connections. It needs traffic before it says anything.
PageSpeed is a lab test from a single machine. Useful as a benchmark and for the specific advice Google gives, but a lab score isn’t what your visitors felt.