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NitroPack review

By 09/05/2023September 22nd, 202310 Comments

NitroPack review: NitroPack is the all-in-one WordPress website speed solution that performs complete site speed optimisation automatically.

Current pricing: £0 – £149

iwebsitez.com rating: 4-5-star-rating

Expert NitroPack review & analysis

In this NitroPack review 2024, many people want to know how to speed up WordPress for page speed or what is the top speed optimisation plugin to make WordPress load faster.

We have found the best plugin to speed up a WordPress website or any landing page or web page with NitroPack.io. Other tools of note are WP Rocket, Seraphinite Accelerator, Autoptimize, WP Fastest Cache and W3 Total Cache.

They all help website performance, but which one is best? Let’s find out in this review. The thing about NitroPack, it not only speeds up your site, but NitroPack comes with all the optimisations built in. NitroPack takes care of everything.

Within the NitroPack dashboard, everything from CSS optimization to HTML optimisation and javascript optimisation, nitropack will automatically do it all for you.

Being a website owner, if you’ve just created your WordPress site, chances are you don’t care or overlook your website loading time.

This is common and often felt earlier in your website journey, but site speed and finding the best cloud-based performance optimization tool will soon become a much bigger issue. nitropack

It turns out that your website’s slow speed score might be the reason for the lack of traffic, lack of views and heightened bounce rate, among other issues.

There might be many reasons for a slow website, and numerous solutions exist. So, is there a good WordPress plugin to increase your Google pagespeed score?

Well, we’re very proud to introduce you to NitroPack, a cloud-based performance optimisation tool that does work with a content delivery network.

NitroPack will effectively help you take care of this issue, among other things, like core web vitals and being able to pass the core web vitals found in Google Search Console. With this issue taken care of, you can expect a fully functioning website with a much better pagespeed score than ever before.

So, without further ado, let’s look at NitroPack and how it performs.

Web development

If you need a WordPress developer or website designed, please get in touch.

Why is pagespeed important?

Page speed is a crucial aspect of website design and is vital for several reasons. Firstly, it impacts the user experience.

When a website loads quickly, it makes browsing the site a more pleasant experience for the user. They are less likely to get frustrated and leave the site and more likely to engage with the content.

Secondly, page speed is a factor that search engines like Google consider when ranking websites. A faster website will generally rank higher in search results, making it more visible to potential visitors.

Finally, page speed can also have a direct impact on the bottom line. A fast-loading website can increase conversion rates, making users more likely to complete a purchase or sign up for a service. On the other hand, a slow-loading website can discourage users from completing an action, resulting in lost revenue.

In short, page speed is crucial because it can affect user experience, search engine rankings, and conversion rates. A faster website will provide a better user experience, rank higher in search results, and increase conversion rates.

So you can see why WordPress website page speed is essential.

Before I get into the full review of the NitroPack, you must understand precisely why pagespeed is so essential. Firstly, a slow website can cause a very high bounce rate.

If you have a significant bounce rate, viewers aren’t usually on your page long before they leave. This lack of time spent on your website could mean fewer affiliate product purchases, fewer return viewers and an overall lack of content viewers.

Not only is a slow WordPress site and a slow speed score will be bad for your viewers, but it’s also bad for SEO. Search engine optimization is the most well-known strategy to help deliver more traffic to your website because your site ranks high in searches. Numerous factors can affect SEO, and a slow website is one of them.

The fact is that Google, Bing or any other search engine you’re trying to rank on may only consider the faster-loading websites to rank at the top.

Try it yourself; test your site speed on pagespeed insights before installing NitroPack, and then test your speed optimization again. The best tools for testing to see if you have a fast website are GT Metrix, Google Pagespeed Insights and Pingdom.

Page Speed Insights is probably the preferred tool as you measure your performance in Google, so you want to know what it measures your site speed at.

gt metrix score after nitropack
google page speed insights after nitropack

Our results with nitropack using GT Metrix and Google Pagespeed score are very pleasing for us and our website visitors. Nitropack is also compatible with CDNs (content delivery networks) too.

Why not try NitroPack for FREE on your website?

What is NitroPack?

Unlike other plugins, NitroPack is a cloud-based service between your host server and your website’s visitors. As a result, the service adds minimal overhead to your servers since NitroPack’s infrastructure performs all heavy optimisations.

For those who don’t know, a plugin is a label given to an additional content source that may benefit you in various ways. A website plugin can be compared to an in-game DLC. It’s not necessary for your game, but it can help and better your performance. nitropack review

When installed, NitroPack will work on numerous different angles to optimise and better improve your website. This is done in many ways and will ensure a faster site speed (load time), unlike any other caching tool. What makes the NitroPack standout, which is reported by other NitroPack users, is the improvement in the core web vitals report, WordPress page speed, success rate and cache-hit ratio and reliability.

 

NitroPack utilises various tools and strategies to speed up load time, especially in Google pagespeed insights. This wide array of tools that are utilised makes Nitropack stand out from the rest, as most other plugins promising excellent load time don’t deliver this. NitroPack is an ageless, reliable tool that is consistently evolving and updating, so it stays on track and absolutely must be used if site speed is something you desire.

How does NitroPack work?

  • NitroPack reduces load times, improves PageSpeed scores and boosts real-user metrics like the Core Web Vitals for better results than almost all other caching plugins.
  • NitroPack doesn’t require any coding or technical skills. You can set it up in less than five minutes and see an instant page speed test result. The service keeps your website’s pages optimized automatically, including optimising for the largest contentful paint, which is desirable these days.
  • If you have a WordPress, OpenCart or Magento website, you can install NitroPack via a connector (or extension). These connectors make it super easy to set up NitroPack on one of these supported platforms. Just follow the instructions from NitroPack’s Help Center, and you should be done in no time.
  • NitroPack also has a PHP SDK and API to integrate with other websites. Make sure to go over their documentation with your developer.
  • Unlike other plugins, NitroPack is a cloud-based service between your host server and your website’s visitors. As a result, the service adds minimal overhead to your servers since NitroPack’s infrastructure performs all heavy optimizations. Also, NitroPack makes light work of javascript optimisation for better website performance optimisation.

NitroPack presets

  • To make things even simpler, NitroPack has four preset optimization modes – Standard, Medium, Strong and Ludicrous (which is the default).
  • Each preset mode applies a different combination of features. Most websites use either the Strong or Ludicrous modes. The most significant difference is that the Ludicrous mode delays JS scripts and prioritizes the HTML and CSS. This behaviour can improve the user experience since it helps browsers load content faster. However, the Ludicrous mode might be suboptimal for some JavaScript-heavy websites. The presets make using NitroPack much easier. You don’t have to worry about hundreds of speed settings.
  • There’s also Manual Mode for those who want to tweak and customize NitroPack to your needs. It lets you change many advanced settings related to image optimization, Critical CSS, resource loading and more.

Nitropack includes these features.

  • Advanced Caching Mechanism. NitroPack offers all the basic caching functionalities that you need. For example, you can set cache expiration time and a validation period for stale responses. The service also creates separate cache files for desktop, mobile and tablet. In terms of advanced features, NitroPack offers Cache Invalidation and Cache Warmup, which help the service: (1) detect changes on your website automatically, (2) mark old representations as stale and (3) create new cache files. All of this happens automatically and in the background. You don’t need to do anything except turn on Cache Warmup.
  • Built-in CDN. NitroPack uses Cloudflare CDN. It works automatically once you set up NitroPack.
  • Complete Image Optimization. NitroPack uses lossy compression to reduce image file size. It also converts all images to WebP while keeping the original format as a backup for browsers that don’t support WebP. Features like Preemptive Image Sizing and Adaptive Image Sizing help browsers allocate the correct amount of space for each image. Again, all image optimization features are enabled by default and included in the price.
  • Standard Optimization Techniques. By default, NitroPack applies many proven best practices for speed optimization like code compression and minification, lazy loading for images, videos and iFrames and more.
  • Proprietary Resource Loader. JavaScript execution and many resources per page are two of the modern web’s biggest speed problems. Both take CPU cycles away from the main thread, hindering the rendering process. NitroPack doesn’t use built-in-browser techniques to solve these issues. Instead, it uses a special resource loader, which rearranges how resources are fed to the main thread. The service also preloads lots of assets. This is done to take advantage of the modern CPU’s multi-core nature by offloading tasks away from the main thread.
Buy NitroPack

Other tools to consider are WP Rocket & Seraphinite Accelerator

Attributes of NitroPack

 

TypePerformance optimization plugin
Best forImprove Google pagespeed
FeaturesGoogle-PageSpeed focussed optimisation
JavaScript compression
CSS modification
Amazon CloudFront integration
Starting price£16/month
CompetitorsWP Rocket
Jetpack
WP Fastest Cache
Autoptimize
Litespeed Cache

More NitroPack features

  • HTML compression & minification
  • CSS compression & minification
  • JS compression & minification
  • Code minification
  • Faster painting
  • PageSpeed optimization
  • Browser-aware caching
  • Image Lazy Loading
nitropack

New feature – Font Subsetting

Our Font Subsetting feature is now available for all users on a Scale plan.

Fonts are a crucial aspect of any website, but they’re often overlooked when optimising performance. Our latest feature allows you to optimize your font files for an even better user experience.

In this article, we’ll explain the impact of fonts on web performance, how our Font Subsetting feature works, and how you can test it on your website.

The Impact of Fonts on Web Performance According to the Web Almanac, 80% of desktop and mobile web pages use web fonts. These fonts are often linked in external stylesheets or HTML markups. By default, CSS files are “render-blocking” resources, which slow down the browser’s main thread and content visualization. Using unoptimized font files can result in poor scores, a bad user experience, and increased bounce rates.

How the Font Subsetting Feature Works When font subsetting is enabled, NitroPack creates a smaller version of the original font file by removing unused glyphs. This process reduces the font’s size; in some cases, it can even be inlined in the HTML markup for faster loading times.

Benefits of the font subsetting feature

  1. No more Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT)
  2. Fewer network requests
  3. Better user experience and perceived performance

How to Test Font Subsetting on Your Website We encourage you to test this feature before enabling it. Use NitroPack’s Safe mode to try it out. Go to the Settings panel, enable Safe mode, and then toggle on the “Font Subsetting” option in the Fonts settings. Save your changes and test the feature by adding “?testnitro=1” URLs to your pages.

We hope this feature will help you improve the performance of your website even more. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our Help Center.

New feature – Adaptive Image Sizing

Do you want to enhance your website’s speed and user experience? Then you need to pay attention to the images you use. Unoptimized images can slow down your website and frustrate your visitors. But with NitroPack’s new Adaptive Image Sizing, you can now serve high-quality images without sacrificing performance.

What is adaptive image sizing?

Adaptive Image Sizing is an innovative optimization technique that resizes images to match the dimensions of the containers they appear in on different devices like desktops, mobiles, and tablets. This ensures that your images fit perfectly, reducing data usage and loading time.

Better than other image optimization plugins

NitroPack’s Adaptive Image Sizing is more refined than other image optimization plugins like “srcset” in WordPress. Our approach is simple – we optimize the images only once and cache the results. This way, you can serve your visitors as they request them without optimising the images every time.

Optimisation coverage

Adaptive Image Sizing works with all standard images identified by a markup element in HTML, including above and below-the-fold images, carousels, sliders, galleries, and more. Our product team is also working on optimization coverage for background images and other improvements.

How does it work?

Adaptive Image Sizing is a two-step process:

  1. Evaluate Page: We use a headless browser to render a web page and identify the dimensions of the containers in the images that should appear. We crawl all page layouts only once and cache the results.
  2. Resize Images: We then rescale all images to fit the dimensions of the containers they appear in and rename the image’s file name with optimized dimensions.

Check if adaptive image sizing is working

Inspect the images on your website to check if Adaptive Image Sizing is working. Ideally, the images should match the dimensions of their containers perfectly, and the file size should reflect this.

Perfect page experience

Adaptive Image Sizing is a small optimization step that can significantly impact your website. It is fully automated, so you don’t have to do anything. This feature is perfect for eCommerce websites, media outlets, digital publishing, and digital creators with image-heavy blogs.

Get started with adaptive image sizing

Adaptive Image Sizing is available through NitroPack’s Growth and Scale Plan. You can either sign up or upgrade to either of the two paid subscriptions to gain access to this feature. To enable Adaptive Image Sizing, navigate to the NitroPack Dashboard, open Settings > Images, and use the toggle button to activate it.

Installation & setup instructions

Upon installation of NitroPack, you can expect an overall higher website success rate in all areas to follow shortly after. This is all down to the increase in site speed stated earlier.

  1. Create a NitroPack account.
  2. Install for FREE on your WordPress website.
  3. Go to your NitroPack Account Dashboard > Connect your website, copy the Site ID and Site Secret, and paste them to the relevant places inside your WordPress website.
  4. Go to Nitro Dashboard > Settings and set Ludicrous mode.
  5. Go to Nitro Dashboard > Cache warmup and paste your sitemap URL.
  6. Done – Sit back and wait for around an hour and enjoy. No complicated settings, no fuss, only a lightning-fast WordPress website.

Nitropack pricing

NitroPack offers four different categories that get more expensive as you move up the ladder. Drag the slider across to see pricing for the different plans.

nitropack pricing monthly nitropack pricing yearly/annually

All the NitroPack pricing plans have the option to pay annually, but in the annual plans, you get 2 months of NitroPack for free, and their customer support via their tech team is impressive for you or your client websites.

Try NitroPack

NitroPack with ad scripts

There are many websites online that say that NitroPack strips the ad code from the scripts and does not show a Google ad or any other Adsense type ads.

We spoke to NitroPack & ads are supported!

By default ad scripts are excluded from NitroPack’s optimization process. These exclusions are applied to multiple ad providers/companies – Google, Amazon, AdThrive, and Mediavine. The ad scripts from these properties can be identified.

Ezoic ads on the other hand use a different approach to their ad scripts and their scripts cannot be easily identified. This is why the only currently supported way to use ads with Ezoic + NitroPack is to integrate via Ezoic’s plugin. Otherwise, there will be issues and ads will likely not work.

There is also an option to allow NitroPack to optimise the ad scripts for Google, Amazon, AdThrive and Mediavine. However, due to the nature of how ads work, this option may not work in all cases. We have many clients using it, however, it is not stable enough yet to allow us to enable it globally. The best way would be to test this option personally on a site-by-site basis.

There is also a third use case – ad scripts loaded via Google tag manager. When ads are loaded via tag manager, NitroPack has no way to detect that, all we can see is that the tag manager is being loaded but not the subsequent scripts.

This is when issues may arise because the default excludes ad scripts no longer work. When this is the case the ad scripts will behave as described in the previous section – ads will work in some cases and not in others.

This is why what we always suggest is to make sure that ad scripts are embedded in the HTML code of your pages instead of loading them through tag manager.

If that is the case, that your ads are being affected, NitroPack’s support team is available to look into those and find a workaround if any scripts are affected, so don’t worry.

Search Engine Optimisation

If you need an SEO agency to rank higher on google, please get in touch.

Coupon code

With this coupon, you will receive a 10% discount forever on NitroPack.

Instructions

  1. Simply click the big green button, and it will open NitroPack in a new tab.
  2. On the iwebsitez tab, the coupon code will be highlighted, right-click
    and copy the code, and apply it on the NitroPack tab at checkout.

Voila! Enjoy your 10% discount!

Pros

  • Predictable pricing. All features are included in the plans, so there’s no need to worry about hidden costs or additional plugins
  • Simple to install & setup
  • Easy to manage
  • Easy to flush the cache for individual pages
  • Reduces quite a lot in most cases the number of requests
  • Amazing results after installation
  • High-quality support

Cons

  • Can affect ad scripts, but can be overcome 😊
  • Can take a little time to show changes
  • Database optimization can be tricky
  • Doesn’t work on all websites. For example, if you have a Shopify or Squarespace site, you can’t use NitroPack (yet)
  • The Ludicrous mode can be too much for some JavaScript-heavy websites.

NitroPack competitors & alternatives

A NitroPack alternative, as discussed earlier, is either manually implementing performance optimizations yourself by hiring a performance expert or using a combination of plugins that offer something similar to what NitroPack does.

If you go the DIY/hire an expert route, this will require a significant time and money investment. If you go the multiple plugins route, you will need, at the very least, a separate caching plugin, image optimization plugin and a CDN provider that either you or an expert have to set up and configure to work together.

  • Some popular caching plugins are Seraphinite Accelerator, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Fastest Cache.
  • Some popular image optimization plugins are Smush, ShortPixel, EWWW Image Optimizer.
  • In either case, you should factor in the significantly higher time and money investment than using NitroPack, which is pretty affordable and incredibly easy to set up, even if you don’t have severe technical or development skills.

Summary

Key points:

  • If you make money from your website, you should consider investing in a tool that
    provides top-notch performance. NitroPack is that tool.
  • NitroPack is an all-in-one speed optimization solution. It has everything you need for a fast website in one place and is dead simple to set up.
  • With the NitroPack performance rate, all speed features are bundled into the product and price. No need to get other addons or third-party plugins.
  • The price tag might seem excessive if you don’t make money from your website. However, NitroPack offers a Free Plan with generous features that can accommodate small and non-income-generating sites for free. However, you will have the NitroPack badge on your site.

Nitropack is a must-purchase to maintain or build a website with fast page load times. It can help generate more leads and purchases alongside a more significant viewership and will undoubtedly encourage online success.

So, if you’re searching for the best tool to speed up WordPress, or perhaps you want more online recognition, I think it’s safe to say, NitroPack is a fantastic tool to speed up your website! Try NitroPack today.

Please share this blog post on your website or social media channels to alert people on how to speed up WordPress and to grab the 10% off for life coupon.

Try NitroPack

Similar speed optimization tools

Please also see our take on WP Rocket & Seraphinite Accelerator

Videos

Speed up your website

Setup

Frequently asked questions

What is NitroPack?

In this NitroPack review, we have found that NitroPack is a website performance, caching system and cloud-based optimisation solution. Therefore, the magic is not performed on your website.
NitroPack outperforms other caching plugins that we have tested. This will improve your core web vitals (web vitals metrics… search console), code optimization, code modification, image compression, page size, website performance, browser caching, page caching, conversion rates and search engine rankings.

Is NitroPack SEO friendly?

According to reports, NitroPack increases website speed on average by over 50%, rendering it quicker and more Google and SEO-friendly. Page load times are a ranking factor and must be considered if the website is slow loading and falling down the search rankings.

Does NitroPack minify code?

Yes. NitroPack can modify code, HTML minification, CSS minification and JS minification, among other caching features for optimized pages.

Does NitroPack really work?

Yes, it works brilliantly, helping speed up websites and website performance. It can improve website speed, even on average servers to under 2 seconds, to load all resources fully. This NitroPack review shows before and after real-world results.

Will NitroPack work with any WordPress theme?

Yes. If you use NitroPack, it is designed to work with any WordPress theme. If any errors occur, our support team is quick to respond and will fix any issues you may have. Support is limited, though, for the free version, which is why for the best performance optimization, we suggest buying one of the paid versions.

Does NitroPack speed up Woocommerce sites?

Yes, if you use NitroPack for WordPress WooCommerce stores, it can have a dramatic effect. The NitroPack caching system combines perfectly with WC and improves critical CSS. It is highly recommended that you use NitroPack for e-commerce/Woocommerce. This is better for Google’s eyes for SEO, user experience, and website performance, which will help your conversion rate.

Does NitroPack optimize images?

Yes. Their image optimisation is clever, includes adaptive image sizing, and pushes the website performance up. See below what it does for image optimization, including lazy loading and other media.

  • Automatically converts images from .png and .jpg to WebP (WebP is faster for web browsing)
  • Lazy load of images (including CSS background images)
  • Lazy loading of iframes
  • Image previews for a YouTube and Vimeo embed

Does the NitroPack plugin help with WordPress site speed optimisation?

Yes, absolutely. It is probably the best WordPress caching plugin on the market and does help slow-loading websites along with core web vitals metrics. It does not matter if your site is on cPanel hosting, managed WordPress hosting, or on your server. The NitroPack plugin helps WordPress.

Is NitroPack cheating?

No, Nitropack is not cheating or fake. This is what NitroPack themselves say. “No, NitroPack doesn’t cheat page speed tools, Google pagespeed insights or website speed in any way. Our users care about real-world performance more than anything else. That’s why cheating a few testing tools would make no sense to us. NitroPack was recognized as the leading site speed solution in the first global Core Web Vitals report.”

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10 Comments

  • Samuel says:

    I purchased using your coupon. Thank you so much I got a great deal!!! Keep up the good work guys.

  • Sian N says:

    Because of your write up on NitroPack I bought this for my site and all I can say is…… WOW! Thank you, this has been a big relief and a load off my mind before Christmas. Lockdown has made me trawl the net looking for a WordPress page speed solution. This does exactly what you said it would.

  • Nick S says:

    Thank you iwebsitez, because of your assessment of NitroPack, I bought it and it has changed my site completely. My wp load time was 7 seconds and after it is now 0.9 seconds. Usually, when you read articles like this you know the site is promoting the product and I know that you are promoting it but when it actually does do what you say it does, that makes a big difference.

    I found the other articles about Nitropack vague and all saying the same old same old, so I felt compelled to leave a comment saying thank you as reading this post has positively affected my website in a big way.

    • iwebsitez.com says:

      Thanks, Nick, we are thrilled our NitroPack evaluation has helped you and we love to hear success stories like yours. Yes, we make a coffee out of it but if we can help make 0.00001% of the internet a faster and better place, then we are happy!

  • Sean says:

    I was using WP Rocket and I measured my site with pagespeed insights and it showed a load time of 3.2 seconds. I read your comprehensive review and purchased it. I did the settings you advised, checked back in an hour on pagespeed insights and I was astonished! I use amazon CloudFront too and the caching mechanism nitropack uses must be so clever because my load times were down to 1.1 seconds. I especially like the cache warmup feature, but with all my other test results, the browsing experience is a first-class now. The speed optimisation on my site now is like it is on a dedicated server with tons of ram.

    I never leave reviews for sites I find software on, but for this find and what it has done for my business, I am truly grateful.

    • iwebsitez.com says:

      Wow, amazing result Sean. Thank you for your kind words and detailed description, I am sure the other readers will appreciate your thoughts.

  • Scott W says:

    Thank you iwebsitez for this in-depth NitroPack review!!!!!! This has really saved my bacon. Because of your coupon and review, it made me buy NitroPack and it is now loading in under a second. This has helped user experience and people bouncing from my site. I don’t normally leave reviews but this time I felt compelled to.

    • iwebsitez.com says:

      Ah that’s great Scott. So pleased we helped you speed up your site. It makes for a better internet if all sites are quick and we are helping people 1 site at a time! 💪

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