Alternatives to NitroPack & Nitro Enterprise

0:00Why People Look for NitroPack Alternatives

WP Speed Fix. In this video we're going to talk about alternatives to NitroPack, which we get asked about a lot. We have this blog post on our website. If you go to wpspeedfix.com/nitropack-alternatives you'll get it. There are two reasons why people come to us asking about alternatives to NitroPack. The first one is cost. NitroPack can get pretty expensive if you have a lot of traffic.

The second one is that more often than not it doesn't solve Core Web Vitals issues completely. It can make the site much faster, but it can create a lot of layout shift, or CLS, which means they're still failing Core Web Vitals and you haven't really solved the root cause of the problem, even though it's an expensive solution. For the most part you can get a better experience with a manual optimization as opposed to using NitroPack. NitroPack is kind of a brute force, very heavy-duty, heavy-handed optimization. It doesn't take into account specifics about your website. So let's talk about what we recommend in terms of alternatives.

1:09Fix Your DNS Hosting First

First off, probably the biggest mistake we see is people using NitroPack but with bad DNS hosting. Everything starts with your DNS hosting. DNS hosting, domain name system hosting, basically turns web addresses into IP addresses. If you're on the host's DNS hosting, or the DNS hosting that came with your domain name, it's probably slow, and most often we see that as GoDaddy DNS hosting. Typically we would say move the DNS hosting to Cloudflare first, and even if you don't switch NitroPack out you will get a speed boost. Or use another fast DNS host.

If you go to the website dnsperf.com you'll see DNS hosting speeds compared. Cloudflare is almost always in the top three worldwide. The microphone's being funny. So, top three worldwide, and it's free. You can use Cloudflare without any of the other services and just use it as a DNS hosting service. Typically that's what we would recommend: fix your DNS hosting before messing around with any NitroPack stuff.

1:56Making NitroPack Work Better With Flying Pages and Speculative Loading

If you are planning to keep NitroPack, if you don't find an alternative, let me fix this microphone, what's going on. Typically we'd recommend using the plugin called Flying Pages. I'll just load it up here, one second. It's free. This plugin here will make NitroPack work better. It does a few things: it does just-in-time preloading, and it does background loading of pages as well. Just-in-time preloading, if you go to the website instant.page, is a tool in itself. You can use this instead of Flying Pages. Flying Pages is better if it's full WordPress. If you don't have WordPress, instant.page is what you should use instead.

Basically there is a delay between when you hover and when you click on something. You see there that was 2 seconds. What just-in-time preloading does is start loading a link as soon as you hover over it, so it's already started to load before you click it. You kind of cheat the latency. It started background loading the page already before I clicked. In this case it would have made it 300 milliseconds faster. But if I'm sitting over this link for a second or two, that can be 2.5 seconds, the page has kind of fully loaded in the background, so when I click it, it loads nearly instantly. Hence instant.page.

Flying Pages does a similar thing, but it will also start to load all the links from the page before you even hover, and it just sits there in the background doing it. We'd recommend that. There is another plugin that does an even more aggressive version of this, so we'd recommend using a combination of both. This one here is the Speculative Loading plugin from the WordPress performance team. It's a newer version of what Flying Pages does, or a different version of it, so it won't just load the HTML, or load the entire page. The combination of the two, Speculative Loading and Flying Pages, will make a huge difference to speed and you'll get more out of NitroPack.

It will drive your costs up substantially, so keep that in mind, because you're going to be loading significantly more stuff even though it's faster. If you're going to keep NitroPack, do that. I think that might be mentioned on this post, or maybe we have another post about NitroPack reviews and it's mentioned there. Anyway, those two would be the places to start before looking for alternatives. They will make things better.

4:21Good Hosting and Cloudflare APO

You need good hosting. We say this all the time. We see people on $2 a month hosts who want a fast site and want to pass Core Web Vitals. Cheap hosting is cheap for a reason: it's low quality and it can't handle a lot of load. The price difference between good hosting and shitty cheap hosting is the price of a couple of coffees versus the price of a nice lunch, so it's false economy going with a $2 a month host. We recommend Cloudways, cways.net, probably for most people, particularly anyone who's interested in performance. Probably most people reading this, Cloudways would be a better fit than their existing cheap host if you're on cheap hosting. Check that out. The prices are cheap, you can get a basic server for 10 or 15 bucks a month. Dirt cheap.

In terms of alternatives, you'll get a better experience using good hosting, Cloudflare with the APO service, either the WP Rocket or FlyingPress plugin, and some manual optimization. We'd recommend switching over to Cloudflare. Cloudflare APO is five bucks a month, Automatic Platform Optimization. Cloudflare on its free plan is doing content delivery network work. If you're not familiar, a content delivery network is a network of servers around the world that host some part of your website. That's what NitroPack is doing as well, it's a type of content delivery network, and NitroPack has a bunch of optimizations on top.

APO is another optimization where Cloudflare will cache the entire page on their network, so it speeds things up even faster. That's the five bucks a month. Then the Cloudflare paid plan, which I think is 25 bucks a month if you go monthly or 20 bucks a month if you go yearly, does pretty much everything NitroPack does. It's a little less aggressive, but you'll get a similar result to NitroPack using Cloudflare's paid plan.

6:19WP Rocket vs FlyingPress and Never Stacking Two CDNs

On the hosting itself you need some sort of caching or optimization plugin. We'd recommend WP Rocket or FlyingPress. WP Rocket is more user friendly, so if you're a DIY, not super technical, and you just want to install something and have it work, WP Rocket is the way to go. If you want it as fast as possible, I would say go with FlyingPress. I already have it loaded up here. FlyingPress has a lot more features and it's a lot more aggressive. You'll get a better result with it, but some of these optimizations, similar to NitroPack, could actually send you backwards because they're too aggressive in some cases. I'd only go with FlyingPress if you're more technical or you know what you're doing, or if you have a developer. They also have something called FlyingCDN, which again is very similar to the NitroPack CDN and Cloudflare's APO.

An important point: you never want to stack two CDNs on top of each other. You only want to use one. Don't use two together, because you're basically making the traffic go further. It has to go from the user to the first content delivery network, to the second content delivery network, to the hosting, so you're adding more steps there and it will make things slower. It adds more latency. It will also break your caching, because each one of those layers does some form of caching, which means it has a copy of the website or some copy of the website files. If you have multiple layers like that, typically they'll start to conflict, or one will clear and the other one won't clear, and you get mismatches. So I only use one content delivery network. We see all the time people set up Cloudflare and then they also pay for the content delivery network from WP Rocket or FlyingPress. Only use one CDN, because if you use two you'll get a bad result.

7:55Perfmatters, Reliability Over Speed and Finding the Root Cause

Bottom line, there are a few other plugins we typically use here. Perfmatters is for fine, detailed optimizations. There's a lot of overlap between these plugins, so keep that in mind, particularly between Perfmatters and FlyingPress. Our preference when we're doing speed optimization work with customers is WP Rocket and Perfmatters together. That gives us the reliability and simplicity of WP Rocket and then the technical, fine-detail work of Perfmatters. We just find WP Rocket to be more compatible.

One of our rules with speed optimization is reliability over speed, because if the site's unreliable or it's down, that's zero speed, basically. We always want to focus on reliability first, speed second. There's nothing that's going to drive users away more than an unreliable site or a site that's down. They'll put up with a slow site, but they won't put up with a site that's down that they can't access. That's why reliability is always number one for us over performance. You'll find over-aggressive optimizations tend to break websites and send Core Web Vitals backwards.

We use WP Optimize. It does a bunch of stuff, and we largely use it for database work. That's one limitation of services like Cloudflare's APO service or NitroPack: they can't optimize the database or anything inside the hosting. Often they're a patch over the top of underlying problems with the site configuration, so keep that in mind. Whenever you're doing speed work you always want to diagnose the root cause of the speed problems first before hammering a bunch of optimizations on top. When we see people talking about speed all over the web, people tend to just throw out recommendations: minify something, use this, use that. But the first step should always be to troubleshoot what's going on under the bonnet, figure out what the problem is, and then find the solutions for the problem, not just throw random changes at it. Using two CDNs, for example, is something we see all the time, because one is fast, so two must be better, right? Just keep that in mind. You want to troubleshoot the problems.

9:50Checking Your Site With the Core Web Vitals Report

In terms of looking at how your site is loading now, there's this Core Web Vitals report which you can run from our website. I'll just go back here. Under here, the free Core Web Vitals report. There's no opt-in required, so go check that out. It'll give you a pretty report that looks like this, which gives you an overview of how your site is performing. This is the NitroPack website. You can see other people's websites, and you can see competitor websites as well.

This is the last month, or this is September. This data lags behind by 6 weeks or so. This report auto-updates on the second Tuesday of each month, so if you make one for your website, keep that report and it will update every month, essentially. These are the three Core Web Vitals metrics. LCP is how fast the site's loading. LCP is Largest Contentful Paint, when the biggest piece of content on the page is loaded, and this needs to be 75% or more green to be in the passing zone. NitroPack's doing well here. NitroPack is fast.

There is some INP, which is how quickly the site responds to requests. This is very common when we see aggressive JavaScript optimizations. The reason for this is that if you've optimized the JavaScript too heavily, yes, the site will load fast, but once the user goes to interact with it, the JavaScript then loads and adds a delay into whatever they're doing: scrolling, clicking on something, using a search, using an opt-in. Then we have layout shift, and this is the most common problem we see with NitroPack. It can make sites fast, but it often introduces layout shift. This is their own website and they're having layout shift issues. We see this all the time.

You want to look at all of these. This one, LCP, is speed, so there's no doubt NitroPack makes things faster. Whether or not it gets your site into the passing zone really depends on what the root cause of your speed problems is. If you have some database issue, then NitroPack's not going to help there. If you want to explore this report, it also has historical data. If you click these tabs on the left you can see what's been going on over time. This report's pretty detailed in terms of what it can do.

11:45Digging Deeper With Vital Signs Tracker

If you want to dig into your speed further, we have this tool we built called Vital Signs Tracker. It is a Core Web Vitals monitoring tool. I'll just open my screenshots so you can see what's going on. What this does is grab the speed of every user session and every page load on the website, puts it into a database, and we run reports on it. This example here is a WooCommerce cart page, which is quite slow, and you'll see it has the Core Web Vitals metrics across the top. If you want to get detailed performance data on your website, that is a good tool to use as well. There's a video on our website that explains how it works.

12:29Other Optimizations No Caching Tool Will Fix

That's pretty much it for NitroPack alternatives. What else do we have here? That's pretty much all there is in the post. There are some notes here on other optimizations that you should look at. Image optimization: we use either the ShortPixel plugin or EWWW Image Optimizer. We lean towards EWWW now because it can use the hosting to compress the images. Again, content delivery networks like NitroPack and Cloudflare will compress the images, but you're always better to do it on the hosting, because it's done one time and then that file is saved as a smaller file size. With a content delivery network the file needs to be compressed every time it goes through it, so it's not ideal, it's not optimal.

There are some other things you want to look at fixing as well. You want to fix huge pages. None of these tools are going to fix pages that are massive, really fat pages. Typically once a page is over 3 megabytes it's probably going to fail Core Web Vitals, just because there's so much data to download. Keep that in mind. None of these tools, WP Rocket, Cloudflare, are going to fix massive images, which is a very common problem we see, even on blog posts where you might have content writers using Canva, and Canva by default downloads in PNG format, which is very big versus JPEG format. Often you can end up with a lot of content pages that are 5 megabytes plus. None of these tools will really fix that if you've got that issue.

The other thing is 404s and broken code. They're not going to fix that either, and they'll arguably make it worse. You want to run an SEO audit tool on your site as well and just make sure you've got no 404 errors. The most common problem we see with our speed work is a 404 error in the footer or the header of the site, so that's a sitewide issue. Different browsers handle 404s differently. Some browsers will just freeze. They'll have this freeze feeling for about two seconds while they process that error, trying to figure out what to do with it. So checking for 404 errors is important and none of these tools can fix that. Same with broken code: if there's something wrong in the code, something erroring out, they can't fix that either.

14:25Free Speed Test and Free Audit

That's pretty much it, I'll leave it at that for the video. Like I said, there's a whole bunch of detail on the post. We talk about pros and cons, and I've shown you some tools. The other tool you might be interested in is our free speed test tool. This takes about 90 seconds. Again, there's no opt-in required, and it will give you detailed recommendations on how to fix your site, or where it's slow, or what's slow. If you are using NitroPack right now, you'll need to turn it off to get a good report. Otherwise it's reporting on NitroPack's optimizations as opposed to what the site is actually doing itself.

That's pretty much it. If you want to learn more, head over to our website, wpspeedfix.com, and we have this free audit if you want our help. We do site speed optimization, we do technical on-page SEO, and we do SEO audits. If you're interested in getting more help with the website, request a free audit here and we'll have a look at your site, tell you how we can help, and we can go from there. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you have any questions, post a note in the comments and we'll get back to you. Cheers.