GT Performance

Description

What is GT Performance?

GT Performance is a free WordPress performance plugin that speeds up every step between your server and your visitor’s screen. It caches finished pages on your server, trims the CSS and JavaScript each page sends, and lets Cloudflare’s free plan serve your HTML from its edge network. One plugin does all three, and every step knows about the others.

Most sites get fast by combining a page cache plugin, an unused CSS service, a script optimizer, and a Cloudflare add-on. Each tool guesses at what the others are doing, and when a post changes, not all of them notice. In GT Performance one set of rules decides what is cached at your server and at Cloudflare, what is left out of both, and what gets purged when content changes.

It works in three layers:

• On your server: An advanced-cache.php drop-in serves stored pages before WordPress loads. Redis object caching and background database cleanup reduce the work WordPress does when a page isn’t cached.
• In the page: Unused CSS is removed per page, JavaScript is deferred or delayed without breaking dependencies, Google Fonts are hosted locally, hero images can be preloaded, and YouTube embeds load the player only after a click.
• At the edge: A single managed Cloudflare Cache Rule lets the Free plan cache your HTML, and edits are purged URL by URL. An optional origin-pull CDN serves the static file types you choose.

Speed doesn’t matter if the site breaks, so safety comes first. WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and FluentCart carts, checkouts, accounts, and session cookies are never cached at your server or at Cloudflare. Cached pages keep their security headers. Riskier optimizations are off until you turn them on, and one wp-config.php constant switches everything off if something looks wrong.

It also shows its work. Explain this page tells you why any URL is or isn’t cached. Each purge comes with a receipt showing whether it actually reached Cloudflare, the health report lists what needs attention, and settings history lets you roll back a change.

GT Performance suits blogs, content sites, online stores, and anyone who manages sites from WP-CLI or deploy scripts. Everything runs on your own WordPress server. There’s no account to create, no telemetry, and the plugin never contacts servers of its own.

Feature highlights

• Page cache: Pages are served from an advanced-cache.php drop-in before WordPress loads. Files are written atomically, so a visitor never gets a half-written page, and stale pages rebuild in the background.
• Unused CSS removal: Each page gets only the CSS it uses, built on your server. On one measured page, CSS dropped from 320 KB to 101 KB.
• Cloudflare edge caching on the Free plan: One narrowly scoped Cache Rule and exact-URL purges. No Workers, no APO subscription.
• Safe for stores: WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and FluentCart carts, checkouts, accounts, receipts, and session cookies are kept out of both the origin cache and Cloudflare.
• Purges that follow your content: Updating a post also clears the listings, query loops, widgets, reusable blocks, and shop pages that showed it. Unrelated pages stay cached.
• Cache warming: Reads your sitemaps in resumable background batches, warms recently changed pages first, and stops at your cache size budget.
• JavaScript defer and delay: Defer follows WordPress’s own script dependencies, so inline jQuery keeps working. Analytics plugin scripts are protected automatically.
• Explain this page: Shows why any URL is or isn’t cached, what your server holds, and whether Cloudflare agrees.
• Safe mode: One constant in wp-config.php switches off every optimization and cache read without touching a setting.

Page caching

• Atomic origin cache served before WordPress loads.
• Stale pages rebuild in the background instead of in a visitor’s page load.
• Security and indexing headers survive caching: Content-Security-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Frame-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, X-Robots-Tag, and more.
• Optional separate caches for desktop, mobile, and tablet, purged together.
• Hourly cleanup of expired entries, with a configurable cap on cached entries.
• Core, plugin, and theme updates purge the cache, so cached pages never point at replaced asset files.
• Every purge produces a verified receipt, including partial failures.
• Optimize-only mode for hosts that already cache pages, such as LiteSpeed, Hostinger, xCloud, and Kinsta: pages are optimized on their way into your host’s cache, and nothing is stored twice.
• Query parameters that change the page, such as orderby or lang, can get a cached copy per value instead of skipping the cache. Purging the page clears every copy.
• Saving a setting purges only when the change affects cached pages, so a new API token or cleanup schedule leaves the cache and Cloudflare alone.

Unused CSS, built on your server

Stylesheet collection, selector analysis, and pruning all happen on your WordPress server. Nothing is sent to an outside service.

• Three delivery modes: a generated file, all used CSS inline, or critical CSS inline with the rest in a file.
• Built in the background and reused across pages that share a template.
• Page builder state styles are kept for Elementor, Bricks, Divi, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Breakdance, WPBakery, Brizy, Kadence Blocks, Spectra, GenerateBlocks, and SiteOrigin: open menus, active tabs, sticky headers, popups, sliders, and animations.
• Fetch important CSS classes checks sample pages in your browser and keeps styles that JavaScript adds later, such as tables of contents, ads, and sliders.
• Keeps :focus-visible rules, Tailwind’s escaped class names, inline SVG, and non-Latin text intact. Stylesheets it can’t safely analyze pass through untouched.
• CSS Status shows savings, build timings, and failures in plain language, with per-URL and full regeneration.

Cloudflare and CDN

• Compiles and syncs one managed Cache Rule on Cloudflare Free. Your other Cloudflare rules are left alone.
• Purges exact URLs, retries temporary failures up to three times, and honors Retry-After.
• Connects with a scoped API token or a Global API Key with account email.
• The connection check also confirms that visitors actually pass through Cloudflare (proxied DNS) and that APO isn’t caching HTML alongside the managed rule.
• Deactivating the plugin, or wp gt-performance cloudflare disconnect, deletes this site’s managed rule and purges this site’s pages, so Cloudflare never keeps serving pages nothing will refresh.
• Detects xCloud’s Cloudflare Enterprise add-on, reports its edge traffic, and avoids two systems owning the same edge cache.
• Optional origin-pull CDN for static files. You pick the exact file extensions it serves, and HTML, API responses, and third-party URLs stay unchanged.

Built for stores

• Dynamic paths, session cookies, and transactional query parameters from WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and FluentCart are compiled into both the origin and Cloudflare bypass rules.
• Product pages and shop listings clear when price or stock changes through the store’s own tools, not only when the product is saved.
• Speculative loading stays away from cart, checkout, and account pages.

Frontend optimization

• JavaScript defer that respects script dependencies and inline code.
• JavaScript delay until first interaction or five seconds. Off by default.
• Opt-in JavaScript minification, with a fallback to the original script.
• Hero image rules with optional responsive preload, plus per-page options in the editor: script handling, hero image, “Don’t cache this page”, and “Use original CSS”.
• Local hosting for Google Fonts your theme or plugins already load.
• Lightweight YouTube embeds that load the player from youtube-nocookie.com only after a click.
• Separate controls for the main feed and secondary feeds.

Database and object cache

• Database cleanup runs in the background with live progress and a stop button, and keeps the number of revisions you choose.
• Redis object cache with encrypted credentials. Reads the same WP_REDIS_* constants as Redis Object Cache.

See what your cache is doing

• Explain this page in Tools and the admin bar, with a link to view any page with every optimization off.
• Health report in Tools and Site Health, with a redacted export for support requests.
• Background queue you can pause, retry, and cancel from Tools or WP-CLI.
• Settings history keeps your last 20 saves for 90 days, with restore and JSON export and import. Credentials are never stored in history.
• WP-CLI commands for cache, Cloudflare, database, and health. wp gt-performance doctor exits with status 1 when a check fails, so it fits deploy scripts.

Optional AI assistant access

Off by default. On WordPress 6.9 or later, an administrator can let an external AI assistant read cache and health information and, with separate permission, purge or preload URLs and propose settings for approval. It works through the WordPress REST API or the official WordPress MCP Adapter plugin.

On WordPress 7.0 or later, an optional adviser explains diagnostics using the AI provider you configured in WordPress. It shows exactly what will be sent before anything leaves your site.

Works with

• WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and FluentCart
• Cloudflare Free and xCloud, including xCloud’s Cloudflare Enterprise add-on
• Elementor, Bricks, Divi, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Breakdance, WPBakery, Brizy, Kadence Blocks, Spectra, GenerateBlocks, SiteOrigin, GT Page Blocks Builder, and Thrive Architect
• Perfmatters, with coordination over which plugin owns each overlapping optimization
• Akismet and Jetpack
• Site Kit by Google and PixelYourSite, whose scripts are never deferred or delayed
• Redis Object Cache wp-config.php constants
• WordPress Studio and WordPress Playground (SQLite)

Before you turn it on

• Page caching starts from the Setup tab, which checks your server, detects a host page cache, installs the drop-in (or switches to optimize-only mode), and confirms a real cached page.
• Language and currency plugins such as WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot, and WooCommerce currency switchers can show visitors different pages at the same URL. The Integrations tab says what to set for each.
• Riskier optimizations such as unused CSS removal and JavaScript delay are off by default. Test them on staging first.
• GT Performance runs on single sites. It won’t activate on multisite.

Privacy

GT Performance collects no data and has no telemetry. It contacts a third-party service only after you turn on an integration that needs one. Each service, what it receives, and when is listed under External Services below.

Links

• GT Performance Home – features, setup guides, and answers to common questions.
• Changelog – every release with its fixes and upgrade notes.
• Roadmap – what is planned next.
• GT Performance Community – ask questions and get setup help from other users.
• GitHub – bug reports and pull requests are welcome.
• More WordPress Plugins – other plugins by Gaurav Tiwari.

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 sends no data anywhere by default. Each service below is contacted only after you turn on the feature that needs it, and only with credentials you supply.

• Cloudflare API (api.cloudflare.com): Used when you connect your Cloudflare account. Sends your API token or key, zone, the managed cache rule, this site’s hostname when the connection check looks up its DNS records, and the URLs or hostnames being purged. Terms, Privacy Policy.
• xCloud API (app.xcloud.host): Used when you connect an xCloud-hosted site. Sends your xCloud token and site domain to refresh the integration and purge host caches. Privacy Policy.
• Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com): Used when local font hosting is on. Your server downloads the fonts once, with no visitor data, and serves them from your domain. Privacy Policy.
• YouTube (i.ytimg.com, www.youtube-nocookie.com): Used when lightweight embeds are on. The visitor’s browser loads the thumbnail, and loads the player only after the visitor clicks play. Terms, Privacy Policy.

Cache warming, CSS generation, and purge verification request your own site’s URLs only. Script hostnames such as googletagmanager.com are stored only as patterns for matching the scripts your site already loads. They are never contacted.

Technical details