FlyingPress is a premium WordPress speed optimization plugin that helps boost your website’s speed and performance. (Created by Gijo Varghese, an expert in this field).
Most plugins do not actually accelerate websites; instead, they add extra features to justify the cost. But FP is simple to use and has few features, making it easy to set up. You will find it easier to get going even if you have never used it before.
Most cache plugins are designed to mislead page metrics by skipping page elements, but for actual users, the website is very slow. But this plugin improves your website’s speed for people, as shown by speed metrics.
Note: This review is based on version 5.6.0. See what’s new in the FP changelog. It’s Redis this time. And they launched a WordPress hosting service, FlyingHost, which now offers FlyingPress for free.
It is an all-in-one WordPress optimization plugin that provides page and object (Redis) caching, page and image optimization, and real-time Core Web Vitals.
It is not just about caching; it offers many useful optimization features that help speed up your site. I’ve relied on it for almost five years, and nothing else has proved better.
I will break down the FlyingPress speed optimization plugin based on my experience and highlight positives and potential drawbacks. Let’s get into it.
Simple User Interface
It is a suitable cache plugin if you prefer a simple UI/UX with minimal clutter, whether you’re a novice or a pro. A good user interface makes a product more valuable.
Cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache, Swift Performance, and LiteSpeed Cache often have user interfaces that are difficult to navigate, especially W3 Total Cache.
They make it easy for non-technical users to make mistakes (even for devs). However, FlyingPress is the simplest user interface plugin; you don’t have to tweak many settings, and it’ll speed up your website.
Sure, plugins like WP Rocket and Fastest Cache have user-friendly interfaces, but their features aren’t impressive (outdated). But this one simplifies speed optimization for both new and experienced users thanks to its user-friendly interface, and you can clear and preload caches and remove unused CSS with just a few clicks.
Core Web Vitals Tracking
An entirely new feature, but I’ve never seen it in a cache plugin before. When enabled, FlyingPress automatically loads a JavaScript on every page of the website.
It runs for all visitors, including logged-in users, but not on admin pages, and analyzes performance metrics based on Core Web Vitals data collected from real users.
After setup, the JS collects data on Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and TTFB. Unlike PageSpeed Insights, which displays a 28-day average, FP provides up-to-date data. It’s cool what I’m seeing.
You can find more info on FlyingPress’ dashboard under the Vitals tab. It’s possible to pick metrics separately, such as mobile or desktop. You can select a time range, such as the last hour, the previous 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. Identify where issues are at both the page and country levels. It’s a cool feature you won’t find anywhere else.
Image And Script Optimization
It now offers image optimization within the plugin. You can convert images to AVIF or WebP or retain the original format. You can choose between lossless and lossy compression and set new uploads to optimize automatically. The good thing is that all processing happens on their servers, so it doesn’t use your hosting resources.
You can restore all images to the original files by deleting the optimized versions. Or permanently delete originals and retain only optimized images to conserve storage. New updates now group some image and iframe optimizations into a single section.
Media files and images are important for website owners, but they can slow website load times. IFrames are HTML frames that load a different HTML page within a layout. They are commonly found on websites, such as embedded YouTube videos.
Cache plugins typically don’t optimize images; however, FP offers valuable image-optimization features, and FlyingCDN makes them even easier to use.
- Lazy load images and iframes: A common feature in cache plugins, but the good news is that FP lets you exclude pictures above the fold from lazy loading, allowing you to exclude images/iframes from the top of the page.
- Properly Sized Images: Automatically add missing width and height attributes to images to minimize layout shifts. Adapt your images to fit on the page.
- Local Gravatar: It downloads and caches Gravatar images on your web server to improve your site’s performance and reduce external requests.
- Replace YouTube iframes: Handy if you use YouTube videos; this feature can be used before users play videos, showing thumbnails instead of iframe embeds.
Script Optimization
In v.5, CSS and JavaScript optimization are merged. Numerous factors make a website challenging to optimize, and CSS and JavaScript are among them.
Most cache plugins don’t optimize CSS/JS correctly, which can cause websites to crash. But FP settings are safe to use and won’t crash your website with aggressive features.
Minify CSS and JavaScript:
Remove spaces and comments, and reduce property values to minimize CSS file size. Thanks to this safe CSS refinement feature, any site won’t crash. It optimizes standard JavaScript by removing whitespace and reducing file size.
Unused CSS:
WordPress has plenty of unused CSS that needs to be optimized. For this issue, most plugin refinements cause the website to crash. But FlyingPress lets you safely optimize unused CSS. Loading unused CSS only when a user interacts with the site is the safest solution after the main CSS has been rendered, especially for dynamic websites. To keep certain stylesheets, enter the URL or path of any CSS files you want to keep.
Lazy render elements:
This strategy enables you to skip elements on a page until the user interacts with them. It can speed up the site and improve page load time.
WP elements, such as comments and footer parts, don’t need to load quickly. With the latest update, users can pick elements from the Gutenberg editor.
JavaScript Optimization:
Almost every theme and plugin in WordPress uses JavaScript and is a prevalent part of websites, but it often slows them down.
Third-party scripts like ads, banners, and analytics can be difficult to optimize, so that’s why FP has ingenious JavaScript optimization features SUCH AS:
- Delay JavaScript from Site: Loads themes, plugins, and core scripts later for faster loading, and you can choose to load them when the site is idle or after interaction. Moreover, you can exclude scripts that shouldn’t be delayed.
- Delay Third-party JavaScript: This feature allows you to reduce the impact of third-party codes delaying external JavaScript, such as ad networks, analytics, or other third-party scripts. Scripts only load when needed, and third-party code slows down your website and isn’t clear to your visitors.
- Self-host External CSS and JavaScript: Downloads and serves critical external resources locally.
Depending on the website, delaying all JavaScript may not be advisable. Users can use it for most sites because there’s another way to exclude scripts from the delay.
On top of all this, you need to know a few things about optimization and understand the types of JS that shouldn’t be delayed.
Font Tuning And Bloat Removal
FlyingPress allows users to optimize Google Fonts and web-hosted fonts by combining and self-hosting them, and also to preload self-hosted fonts with high priority.
It also supports fallback fonts, ensuring text remains visible while web fonts load. Not only that, it will handle everything for you, including self-hosting and combining.
Sure, fonts are simple, but most aren’t well optimized and can seriously slow down sites, especially if you use Google, Bunny, or Adobe Fonts.
Google uses different fonts based on the user agent. Google also recommends self-hosting for better control. To optimize your website’s speed, host one or two Google Fonts on your server rather than relying on external sources.
Use System Fonts First: Temporarily use system fonts to prevent blank text while custom fonts load.
Bloat Removal
Truth is, when you use bloated themes or page builders, your layouts often get stuck with a single design because most WordPress themes, plugins, and core features contain unnecessary elements. Bloated websites cause inconsistent performance.
And yes, this plugin does not include asset optimization features, unlike Perfmatters. However, it has a few basic bloat-removal features that are useful for most websites.
- Disable XML-RPC: There’s no reason to keep it active, as it’s no longer needed. It also leads to security holes.
- Disable RSS feeds: Users can track their favorite sites via RSS, but this feature is outdated and no longer relevant nowadays.
- Disable Emojis: Emojis in WordPress core aren’t necessary, and It’s not a big deal, but you can remove them by ticking the box.
- Control Post Revisions: WordPress itself often creates duplicate posts, and with this, you can control it.
- Throttle Heartbeat API: It lets you limit background activity to once every 60 seconds, and it can help if your hosting shows high CPU usage.
Also, you can deactivate features like oEmbeds, Block Editor CSS, jQuery Migrate, Dashicons, and WP Cron, but it’s not necessary to disable all. So, these features are PRACTICAL if your website runs on smaller servers, such as Webdock or Starlight.
If your website feels cluttered with Divi or Elementor, consider switching to Gutenberg for a cleaner look. You don’t have to go all out with every feature you can think of for your site; keep it simple.
Cache Settings
Thing is, FP is a cache plugin; its main function is caching, which is enabled by default. You can’t turn it off with a checkbox/click, but you can either disable the plugin or manually ignore the pages. It has some nice caching features like:
Object Cache: in its 5.6.0 release, Redis finally reaches FP. Redis stores database query results in memory to speed up page loads.
Cache for Logged-in Users: it is not recommended for most websites, as it generates cache pages for logged-in users.
Auto-refresh: clears and rebuilds the cache automatically at set intervals to keep content up to date. However, Auto-preloading uses a lot of resources on large or dynamic websites.
Mobile Cache: it creates a separate mobile cache version, which is usually unnecessary for most websites.
Purge Entire Cache: you can clear all cached pages, including FlyingCDN and optimizations; performance will slow down until the caches are rebuilt.
FlyingPress caches and preloads faster than others. You’ll see the results in a few seconds, but it would be helpful to have an option to turn off caching. Some users prefer to use it without caching because it offers robust enhancement features.
Enterprise CDN
Flying-Press includes a WordPress CDN service called FlyingCDN. Previously, it used BunnyCDN; now it’s Cloudflare Enterprise. I’ve written an article about FlyingCDN if you’d like to learn more. I like this update because Cloudflare offers enhanced protection, stability, and network features that are not available with other services.
And FlyingCDN has plenty of cool features, like:
- Full-Page Caching: One of this CDN’s impressive features – it delivers low TTFB by caching entire pages, so they load quickly from Cloudflare’s 300+ edge locations. Web hosts like Rocket.net and BigScoots use Cloudflare’s full-page caching.
- Image Optimization: Cloudflare reduces image file sizes by compressing and resizing them without quality loss (it converts images to WebP).
- Optimized for WooCommerce: We shouldn’t normally cache e-commerce pages, but this feature lets users access cached versions of pages, including shopping carts, for faster navigation.
- Security Features: Cloudflare is robust for site security, and FCDN offers DDoS protection, wildcard SSL, WAF, and bot management.
- Easy Integration: Updating your DNS records simplifies integration.
- Free Trial: They offer a 7-day free trial without requiring a credit card.
Pricing at FlyingCDN is based on data transfer volume (bandwidth). Each 100 GB costs $10 per month. This is similar to pay as you go, but each site incurs a minimum charge of $10/M (per site, regardless of usage).
All-around Compatibility
You can use FlyingPress on all web hosts/server. Even so, some optimization plugins aren’t compatible with specific conditions or don’t work correctly in certain situations.
For example, LiteSpeed Cache works only with LiteSpeed or QUIC.cloud. SG Optimizer only works with SiteGround hosting.
Most managed hosting providers, such as Kinsta, WP Engine, PressLab, and Servebolt, do not allow optimization plugins. However, this plugin runs on all web hosts and server configuration stacks, including Apache, NGINX, and LiteSpeed.
It is compatible with SEO plugins, content optimizers, and other similar ones. However, it won’t work with other caching plugins, such as WP Rocket, WP-Optimize, and W3TC. I have not experienced any issues with different themes or plugins.
Speed Up To Real Humans
Speed up for real users is a crucial part of this plugin, as most optimization strategies nowadays focus on search engines or page speed.
Some methods simply bypass page metrics by skipping page elements. When real users visit your site, everything loads slowly. Optimizing your website solely for speed tests rather than for actual users is like writing for search engines rather than people.
FlyingPress ranks at the top of Google’s Core Web Vitals Technology Report, with a good user experience. The UX report also proves that it often performs better than similar plugins, see here:
It optimizes web pages for both humans and metrics; for instance, you can test page metrics such as PSI, GTMetrix, and Pingdom, which simulate real users rather than bypassing page elements.
Optimizing for users means delivering the ideal user experience, but for page speed metrics, the goal is to load fewer requests first. Even with high scores, that doesn’t mean your site is fast for actual users. Try looking up some ranked websites and seeing their speed rankings. And measure your website’s TTFB using these tools.
It doesn’t mean page speed metrics aren’t essential. There are points for metrics like TTFB, content paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift.
You Can Try It For Free
Here’s the most critical part of the FlyingPress review: FlyingPress’ pricing strategy changed. Renewal is not offered at this time; there is just a flat rate for each plan. But now you can try all the features free for 14 days, and you won’t be billed until then.
Pricing:
- Starter: A website costs $59 per year
- Pro: $99 for three websites
- Business: $199 for 25 sites
- Unlimited: Unlimited websites for $249/year.
It is less expensive than WP Rocket or similar plugins, and it offers unlimited plans. But it still lacks lifetime deals; yes, I know that a lifetime deal isn’t feasible.
Drawbacks And Conclusions
I’ve been using it for over 5 years now. Anything I don’t like? Honestly, not much. I haven’t had any trouble so far. But here are a couple of concerns:
- It caches all your pages by default. To stop some pages from being cached, you must manually exclude them (you can’t disable caching with a single click).
- Documentation isn’t very detailed. It’s enough for most people. It’s not a big deal because it’s simple and has minimal settings (not complicated). But I think some of its features should be explained in more detail.
I don’t see many cons with FlyingPress, but it’s up to you; nothing’s perfect. These are minor things to me. It is a nice solution for most WordPress websites and is compatible with WordPress cloud hosting control panels and all other web hosting providers.
Final Thoughts:
In this FlyingPress review, I outlined the benefits of using this plugin and noted some potential drawbacks. From I experience, this is the best speed optimization plugin for WordPress users. Yes, the LiteSpeed plugin is an option for those seeking a free plugin, but its main drawback is the lack of cache preloading. Also, your server needs to be LS.
Whatever your skill level, from beginner to pro, you can speed up your website. The new image optimization feature makes the plugin a complete optimization tool.
It’s got plenty of cool features that accelerate your site loading speed. I recommend using Cloudflare APO, FlyingCDN, or FlyingHost with FP to improve your website’s TTFB by caching the full page.
You can use free Cloudflare integration with FP for full-page caching. You can also use FlyingCDN or RocketNet to utilize Cloudflare at the enterprise level.
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