Perfmatters Review – Premium WordPress Optimization Plugin

Perfmatters is a speed optimization plugin. Which aims to make any WordPress website load faster than before.

I’ve been very cautious about page loading time and performance here at BforBloggers from the beginning. I started with shared hosting, then migrated to managed WordPress hosting, just for the sake of getting a better user experience. Even when I didn’t really have to.

Permatters is a simple plugin that allows you to disable certain scripts, code snippets, and parts of your WordPress website.

Things like EMoji scripts, WordPress Embeds, XM-RPC pings and JQuery script do have an impact on loading time. Scripts and Query Strings take time to load once your basic page elements finish loading.

This is why you see the loading icon on your browser every after your content appears because there are elements you can’t see that need to load.

So, disabling these necessary scripts, codes and strings can improve website performance significantly.

And Perfmatters helps you with all of that. It has a basic set of “performance options” you can enable to remove unnecessary functions and codes.

It is a premium plugin and you’ll have to purchase a subscription first to use it.

Once you download and install Permatters plugin, you can see the Perfmatters dashboard by clicking on the settings button.

Here you’ll find the all the functions you can disable.

Most of these functions are unnecessary and you won’t notice their presence or absence.

Certain features of your WordPress installation significantly increases the database size.  And to process a larger database, the server needs extra time to process additional files.

With Perfmatters you can disable the following:

• Disable Emojis
• Disable Embeds
• Remove Query Strings
• Disable XML-RPC
• Remove jQuery Migrate
• Hide WP Version
• Remove wlwmanifest Link
• Remove RSD Link
• Remove Shortlink
• Disable RSS Feeds
• Remove RSS Feed Links
• Disable Self Pingbacks
• Disable REST API
• Remove REST API Links
• Disable Dashicons
• Disable Google Maps
• Disable Google Fonts
• Disable Password Strength Meter
• Disable Comments
• Remove Comment URLs
• Disable Heartbeat
• Heartbeat Frequency
• Limit Post Revisions
• Autosave Interval
• Change Login URL

The last performance option is actually a great security feature and a nice addition from the Perfmatters team.

The “Change Login URL” option allows you to change the default “login” and “wp-admin” slugs to something unique and unpredictable. Which makes it technically impossible to access your login page reducing DDoS and splogger attacks.

I would highly recommend you to change the login URL. Especially if you allow guest authors or forum registration. I’ve talked about securing the wp-admin directory at this article in detail.

Additionally, Perfmatter also has a lazy load featured for images and iFrame videos.

There’s an option to enable DOM monitoring. DOM is basically what helps dynamic content load on your WordPress website.

Enabling DOM monitoring will also enable the lazy load to optimize for dynamic elements on your website such as option forms and a contact form.

Once you enable this, Perfmatters will not load the Youtube video along with the page, instead, a static image thumbnail will now appear. Youtube videos on your website or blog posts won’t load until a user clicks on the thumbnail.

If you’re using WooCommerce plugin for powering your e-commerce store, you can disable specific elements of WooCommerce:

• Disable Scripts
• Disable Cart Fragmentation
• Disable Status Meta Box
• Disable Widgets

I suggest you disable the scripts and test if your e-commerce store doesn’t break. WooCommerce is notorious for enabling a hell load of scripts.

Disabling these will give you a serious edge in page speed scores.

Make sure you test your page speed score only after clearing the cache.

CDN compatibility is another feature Perfmatters has.

If you’re using a CDN such as StackPath or KeyCDN you can enable CDN rewrite. But only if you’re having a custom CDN URL.

For Cloudflare, users don’t have to use this feature though. Cloudflare offers custom setup on premium plans as well as their own WordPress plugin.

Perfmatters is totally compatible with WP Rocket. Perfmatters is a speed optimization plugin and WP Rocket is a cache plugin, and they both complement each other.

However, you’ll have to make sure you able CDN rewrite on only one of those two plugins.

I’ve used WPX hosting combined with the WP Rocket cache plugin to get the loading time under 1 second.

I was pretty surprised by WPX hosting performance. And WP Rockets one-click optimization.

That’s the benchmark for us in this article.  We’ll see if Perfmatters can beat the WP Rocket – the best cache plugin in the industry since 2017.

To make this review even more interesting I’ll be testing Perfmatters on Kinsta WordPress managed hosting, which is a recommended hosting platform by Perfmatters. According to its founder Brian Jackson, Perfmatters works best in Kinsta’s environment.

I migrated BforBloggers (this blog) from WPX to Kinsta in march 2020. And purchased Perfmatters in July so I’ve had plenty of time to test everything to make sure I can write a decisive article for you.

After migrating the blog to Kinsta, using Perfmatters with WP Rocket resulted in a 1.47 second load time.

This is after I made a few new content boxes using custom CSS here on BforBloggers. Notice the number of requests has decreased from 99 to 74. But the page size has increased to 1.8 MB.

I’m using a custom theme setup and this is quite okay. I enabled all the performance optimization options and perfmatters did a fine job.

The real problem is the theme and page size. Perfmatters recommends GeneratePress is the preferred theme for optimum performance. A Custom theme setup seemd too much for Perfmatters to optimize.

So, if you are using GeneratePress, Astra, or OceanWP, Perfmatters will work even better.

Who should buy Perfmatters?

If you’re using heavy plugins, custom code/CSS or a custom theme then perfmatters works quite ok-ish.

Perfmatters is a great solution for casual bloggers and normal WordPress set up users. If you’re using a lightweight SEO friendly theme and a good quality shared hosting, using Perfmatters will surely improve the performance.

Is it worth the price of $24.95 per year for 1 website?

Absolutely. It isn’t overpriced, and it’s quite affordable.

It cuts out the work for you. You simply install it, enable a bunch of options and your website is faster than before.

Are you using Perfmatters? Have you used it before?

Or do you have any questions?

Let me know in the comments below.