Swift Performance Review Pros And Cons (9 Facts)
The Goal
In this swift performance review, I will share you my personal opinion on this caching plugin after applied on some of my websites & here are my finding in summary.
The goal of this guide is to help you to understand & will have clear decision whether swift performance is suitable for your website or you should choose other caching plugin for your WordPress website.
Pros
Fact #1 – Alternative for Litespeed caching plugin
- I would say that, if your hosting is not using Litespeed server, then you are unable to maximize the full potential of the free Litespeed caching plugin. Swift performance Lite turn out to be one of the best alternative free caching plugin if you do not have Litespeed server hosting for your website.
- You can also use swift performance even if you are using hosting with Litespeed server technology if your website is small or have less pages. This is because the Litespeed caching plugin is best for website for many pages & high traffics
- In my opinion, the free version of swift performance can even overtake some of the paid version of caching plugin in the market.
Fact #2 – Best caching plugin for low budget website with fewer pages
- Their free lite reloaded version now added even more premium functions for free. This is what makes swift performance become one of the best free caching plugin in the market. Because of this, you can save your budget for those premium features on running your website.
- The free version is specially best if your website that have poor performance & have fewer pages website. (around 300 pages).
- You can still continue to use the free version as long you have small & low traffic website & it will still bring your website to the optimum performance.
- In my opinion, you should consider to their pro version if your website have grown more than 300 pages with high traffic & if you would like to unlock more functions for larger website traffics.
- You may see the pro features here.
Fact #3 – For all level of experience users
- Swift performance can be easily speeding up your website with their 1-click auto config function even if you are a beginner with no coding knowledge at all. Just setup using their 1-click auto config & you are good to go.
- Swift performance also suitable for advance user that know what they are doing & would like to set things manually to match their personal needs for full advantage to get maximum website output.
- So swift performance is for everyone & highly compatible with any theme or website.
- If you have any issue, you can easily contact their support or joining their official fb group.
Fact #4 – All-In-One solution caching, image optimization, database optimization, CSS & JS optimization, plugin organizer & many more…
- To save your time, as there are so many functions that can achieve by using this plugin, I will not go through each & every function in this guide. You may refer here, if you are interested to know each & every function in details.
- With all these functions, I will summarize that swift performance is an all in 1 solutions plugin, which means you only need 1 plugin to achieve everything you need to improve your website performance.
- This will keep the minimum number of plugin you need to install on your website.
- This will also avoid your website to have unnecessary plugin compatibility issue, if you need to install many plugin on different developer.
For example: If you need to do certain task, and you install on each different plugin from each different company & many of them will have duplicate same function & this will bring up the unnecessary conflict among those plugins and your website will run even slower than before because of doing the same task twice or more. And the worst case scenario, your website will crash, and you need to waste time on troubleshooting which plugin that is causing the crash.
Fact #5 – Preloading caching function
- The preloading caching function is one of the function that I like the most to greatly increase the speed of every important pages or posts for visitors.
- With this preloading caching, swift performance will preload the cache of each page or posts base on the priority from the most to the least visitor pages.
- So the next time the visitor visit that page, it will just load instantly.
Cons
Fact #6 – May look too techy for non-experienced users
- Most of the beginners think that if they toggle every function on, it will make their site performance to the best stage, but in reality this is not the case.
- To overcome this, you do need to learn to gain your skill & experience to only change the functions that you really understand, taking full advantage of this plugin.
Fact #7 – No direct guides for next step for solution
- I found that although, the 1-click auto config setup everything for you, but if you get see there is any issue on that scan, you are not guided to take the direct next step for the solution of that issue.
- Most of the beginners will just leave it ignore, because they don’t know what to do next, to solve that issue & this will not unlock the full potential of this plugin.
Fact #8 – User navigation menu experience
- In my opinion, for their user navigation menu, I think they can improve on their navigation menu for cleaner & easier functions navigation layout to look modern & better design.
- I found that if we switch to advance settings, especially when we click on one of the left side menu function settings, we will need to scroll far to the bottom to view all the available settings.
Fact #9 – Not 100% set & forget
- From my experiment on this plugin, the caching setup for this plugin will still need to go through again from time to time if there are any changes on your website.
- You will need to adjust some settings & fine tune your website, even after using the 1-click auto config.
Conclusion
Swift Performance plugin is your best alternative if:
- You are looking for best free caching plugin with premium features.
- You are using with or without Litespeed server.
- Your website is small in my opinion with around up to around 400 pages & fewer traffics. If you have more than that, you should consider their PRO version to handle that.
Next Step
You may also like to check their full list of features & benefits here.
You may also like to check the best Swift Performance settings here.