Minimal Features | No Improvements for Many Years

Dear SiteGround,

We hope you will accept this as constructive feedback.

What We Like About Speed Optimizer:

1. Beautiful user interface.
2. Easy to navigate.
3. Great customer support.

What We Don’t Like About Speed Optimizer:

1. Unable to custom purge cache (by URL) via built-in user interface (lacking feature).
2. When we enable Memcached, our website slows down significantly (verified by SG).
3. When we enable Memcached and visit the plugin’s Dashboard section, our WP Site Health Status score breaks (verified by SG).
4. When we enable Combine CSS Files and Preload Combined CSS, the resulting SG CSS file is always render-blocking (verified by SG). With Perfmatters, we never have this issue.
5. Unable to remove Unused CSS (lacking feature).
6. The Speed Test module is not reliable. Most of the time, it’s unable to connect with Google’s servers (verified by SG). Also, we always have to run the speed test twice — one for desktop results and one for mobile results. Best to obtain all results at once with one click (same as PageSpeed Insights).
7. The option to connect this plugin to Cloudflare was removed. Taking away what we’ve been using for over two years is not a good thing.
8. The Lazy Load Media feature is not as efficient or easy to use compared to other plugins. It does not allow the user to exclude images simply using the image URL (lacking feature). We use Perfmatters instead.
9. While useful, the plugin heavily relies on Code Snippets to perform additional functions. Perhaps some can be revisited and incorporated into the plugin in the future.
10. There is no public site (e.g., blog or knowledgebase site) where we can view SG’s future plans for this plugin. Would be nice to have one. Perfmatters (and other plugins) do offer this.
11. The Details section of this plugin is heavily loaded with both technical and non-technical information. It keeps on growing as more issues and solutions are developed for this plugin. Perhaps this section can be simplified by transferring most data to SG’s knowledge base (with a reference or link to it in the Details section).
12. There is no option for custom-scheduling our database maintenance. Daily, monthly, or on-demand options are not available. We’re stuck with weekly only.
13. There is no option for generating AVIF images (lacking feature).
14. Plugin contains settings that are now considered deprecated or damaging (e.g., “Remove Query Strings From Static Resources”).
15. Dropdowns are extremely painful to use. They are cumbersome. No open fields to enter URLs directly. Exclusions must be added via separate filter or code snippet.
16. This plugin is not an “All-In-One” plugin. It lacks features that other performance plugins offer.

Overall a decent plugin, but offers a lot of room for improvement.

Update: (August 4, 2024)

Changed our rating from three (3) stars to one (1) star. Why? Read on.

Just learned this plugin was holding our website hostage (for many reasons that we won’t list here).

As soon as we dropped it and switched to another performance plugin, our scores increased significantly. No back-end nor front-end issues either.

Further, this plugin has not incorporated any features nor improvements for many years. So, it’s time to move on.

Best wishes!