GT Performance

A slow WordPress site usually needs three fixes at once: a page cache, lighter CSS and JavaScript, and an edge cache in front of it all. Most setups stitch these together from three plugins and a Cloudflare dashboard, and the gaps between them are where things break. A cart gets cached for everyone, a purge clears the origin but not the edge, or an optimizer strips the CSS a menu needed.

GT Performance puts those layers in one plugin that knows about all of them. It caches pages on your own server, removes the CSS each page doesn’t use, manages one Cloudflare Cache Rule on the free plan and keeps carts, checkouts and accounts out of every cache. Everything runs on your WordPress server. There is no account, no external optimization service and no telemetry.

Caching is on by default and stays inactive until you install its drop-in. Riskier transformations stay off until you enable them, so you can switch one layer on, check the site and move to the next.

Plugin Features

Page cache

• Atomic origin page cache served by an early advanced-cache.php drop-in, before WordPress loads
• Fresh, stale and browser lifetimes with one-click presets (1 hour fresh and 24 hours stale by default)
• Stale-while-rebuild in the background and stale-if-error protection when the origin fails
• Separate mobile cache for themes that send different HTML to phones
• Automatic purge of the post and its related URLs on publish, update, trash, unpublish or slug change
• Sitemap-driven cache warming after a full purge, with a background preload queue
• Ignored marketing query parameters, plus custom bypass paths, cookies and query parameters
• Automatic cleanup of expired and orphaned entries, capped at a configurable entry budget
• Safe Mode: define GTPERF_SAFE_MODE and every transformation and cache read stops, without touching a setting

Cloudflare on the free plan

• One managed Cache Rule, compiled from the same bypass policy as the origin cache
• Rule preview before sync: the exact expression, drift, competing rules and remaining rule budget
• Exact-URL and full-zone purges, with retries for rate limits and temporary failures
• Scoped API token or legacy Global API Key, encrypted at rest or supplied in wp-config.php
• No APO, Workers, Argo or Enterprise plan needed

Unused CSS, generated on your server

• Removes the CSS each page doesn’t use, per URL, in background jobs
• Three delivery modes: generated file, all inline, or critical CSS inline with the rest in a file
• Keeps hover, focus and other interaction states, plus a safelist with partial or regex matching
• Staged rollout to a percentage of URLs, and 0% restores the original stylesheets immediately
• Status report with sizes saved, build times, failures and per-URL or full regeneration
• Falls back to the original HTML and stylesheets whenever parsing or writing fails

JavaScript

• Minify local scripts, defer safe scripts and delay chosen third-party scripts until interaction
• Automatic protection for cart, checkout and payment scripts
• Analytics plugins are protected automatically: Independent Analytics, Burst Statistics, Koko Analytics, Matomo, WP Statistics, Site Kit by Google, MonsterInsights, ExactMetrics and PixelYourSite

Images, embeds and fonts

• Lazy-load non-critical images while the first images load eagerly
• Missing image dimensions added to reduce layout shift
• WebP or AVIF variants generated on upload and served where available
• Lightweight YouTube embeds that load the player only on click
• Google Fonts hosted locally, with a font-display control

Database and WordPress bloat

• Manual database scan with selectable cleanup, plus scheduled maintenance
• Heartbeat and autosave control
• Switches for emojis, embeds, XML-RPC, jQuery Migrate, Dashicons, self-pingbacks, the password strength meter, global styles, REST API links, Google Maps and more
• Separate controls for the main feed and secondary feeds, so /feed/ can stay live while the rest return 404

Stores and memberships

• FluentCart, Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce adapters built in
• Cart, checkout, account and receipt paths, session cookies and transactional query parameters are compiled into both origin and Cloudflare bypass rules
• Product pages purge when stock or price changes, not only when the post is saved

Redis, CDN and hosting

• Redis object-cache drop-in with host or Unix socket, ACL user, TLS, prefix and timeouts, falling back to request-local caching if Redis goes down
• Reads the WP_REDIS_* constants used by Redis Object Cache, so an existing setup doesn’t need to be repeated
• Origin-pull CDN rewriting for the exact static file extensions you choose
• xCloud integration with host-cache purging and Cloudflare Enterprise add-on detection, so two plugins never fight over the same edge

Diagnostics and tools

• Explain This Page: the cache decision, the reasons behind it and the expected Cloudflare result
• Verified purge receipts that compare response fingerprints and cache headers after a purge
• Admin bar actions to purge, verify, warm or explain the current page
• WP-CLI commands: doctor, cache, queue, cloudflare, xcloud and database
• Perfmatters coordination and Akismet and Jetpack safeguards

Works With Any Host

GT Performance needs PHP 8.1, WordPress 6.6 and a writable wp-content directory. It works on Apache, NGINX, LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed, because the cache is a WordPress drop-in and doesn’t depend on a server module. Cloudflare, Redis, xCloud and a custom CDN are all optional.

Multisite activation is not supported. Its compiled configuration and cache directory would be shared across the network, and one site’s settings would decide another site’s cache.

Privacy

Cached pages, generated CSS and diagnostics stay on your server. GT Performance sends no telemetry and never contacts servers of its own. Third-party services are contacted only after you connect them, and each one is listed under External Services below.

Open Source

GT Performance is free GPL software with no license key and no paid tier. Development happens in the open on GitHub, where bug reports and pull requests are welcome.

Third-party libraries

GT Performance bundles three MIT-licensed PHP libraries in vendor/. All three are GPL-compatible and are used server-side only.

• matthiasmullie/minify – JavaScript minification in memory. MIT.
• sabberworm/php-css-parser – CSS parsing for the unused-CSS engine. MIT.
• symfony/css-selector – CSS selector to XPath translation. MIT.

The full GPL-2.0 text this plugin is licensed under ships as LICENSE in the plugin directory.

External Services

GT Performance works entirely on your server by default and sends no data anywhere. Each integration below contacts a third-party service only after you enable it and, where credentials are involved, only with credentials you supply. There is no telemetry, no account requirement, and the plugin never contacts servers of its own.

Cloudflare API (api.cloudflare.com)

Contacted only when you connect your own Cloudflare account to manage its cache rule and purge its cache. Requests carry the API token or Global API Key and account email you saved, your zone identifier or domain, the compiled cache-rule expression, and the exact URLs being purged. They are sent when you connect, synchronize, run diagnostics, or purge, and automatically when a content change requires an edge purge. Provider: Cloudflare, Inc. – Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.

xCloud hosting API (app.xcloud.host)

Contacted only when you connect a site hosted on xCloud using your own xCloud API token. Requests carry that token and your site’s domain or xCloud identifier, and are sent when you connect or refresh the integration and when host-level caches are purged. Provider: xCloud by WPDeveloper – Privacy Policy.

Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com)

Contacted only when you enable local Google Fonts hosting on a site whose theme or plugins already load Google Fonts. Your server downloads the stylesheet and font files once and serves them from your own domain afterward. The download is a server-side request that carries no visitor data, and the feature removes visitors’ browser requests to Google entirely. Provider: Google LLC – Privacy Policy, Google Fonts privacy notes.

YouTube (i.ytimg.com, www.youtube-nocookie.com)

Involved only on pages where you have already embedded a YouTube video and the lightweight embed option is enabled. The visitor’s browser loads the video thumbnail from i.ytimg.com, and the player loads from the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain only after the visitor clicks play. Your server sends nothing to YouTube; without this option the standard YouTube embed would contact YouTube earlier and more broadly. Provider: Google LLC – Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.

GT Performance also sends requests to your own site’s URLs for cache warming, CSS generation, and purge verification. Those requests never leave your domain.

Hostnames that are matched, not contacted

GT Performance stores a list of script hostname patterns such as connect.facebook.net, googletagmanager.com, google-analytics.com, clarity.ms, and hotjar.com. These are exclusion rules, not connections. They are compared against the script URLs your own site already loads so that those scripts are never minified, deferred, or delayed. GT Performance never contacts these hosts, sends them no data, and adds no script to your site that would.