Perfmatters Review: Love it or Leave it

I have been playing a little with the code snippets and the elements section from GeneratePress.

I was thinking if it was possible for me to use code snippets to take care of some or most of the stuff that PerfMatters does.

Don’t get me wrong, Perfmatters is a great plugin, probably the plugin every WordPress site must have.

If you don’t want to complicate yourself testing if code snippets for this and that still work or if the code snippets don’t conflict with existing plugins, themes, or the WordPress core, you should go and get yourself Perfmatters, your site will thank you for that.

Take into account, that my sites are kinda minimalist so I am not using everything Perfmatters brings to the table in terms of speed optimizations.

Take into account that the Perfmatters team keeps adding features to make WordPress sites faster, it might bring something that my site desperately needs.

These are my notes trying to figure out if I really need PerfMatters or not.

My WordPress Stack

My WordPress stack is kind of simple, I use only 8 plugins:

These are my thoughts about each one of the plugins that I use:

• Ad Inserter Pro add some scripts and styles but they are all necessary if I want to monetize my WordPress site the right way.

• Cloudflare is installed because I don’t want to go to the CF panel to clear the cache every time I modify a page. I also use it on some sites because I am paying for Cloudflare APO.

• Code Snippets gives me the chance to add scripts, styles, and custom PHP so I don’t have to modify the theme files

• GenerateBlocks has only 6 blocks but all the CSS is inlined so I don’t have to worry about it in terms of speed

• GP Premium is something I have to keep using because of the “Elements”. I love GeneratePress

• Rank Math is the SEO Plugin that I have been using.

Most WordPress users recommend using a plugin to handle caching and your site security

I don’t use security plugins because I have built a Firewall using Cloudflare and that firewall is far more powerful than the security plugins out there.

I am not using a caching plugin because my sites are pretty lean and more than 95% of the requests are handled by Cloudflare servers. If I ever use a caching plugin, I would probably use something simple.

PerfMatters Sections

Perfmatters is divided into 7 major sections

Perfmatters: General (1)

This is the part that requires a bunch of code snippets to do what PerfMatters does

I found lots of code snippets to disable and remove some of the unnecessary stuff that WordPress adds to sites.

Login URL

This section also has the option to change the login page URL

I don’t use this option since CloudFlare Firewall Rules are probably the best way to reduce brute force attacks made to the login page.

Note: If you have to manage several sites, the process of keeping these Code Snippets updated could be a pain in the *ss but it is 100% possible

Perfmatters: Assets (2)

The script manager is really useful when you want to remove styles and scripts from your site.

If you don’t have PerfMatters, you can dequeue styles and scripts using code and a code snippets plugin.

I dequeued styles and Scripts that my site doesn’t require so I didn’t really use the Asset Script Manager.

My site has a few scripts I am delaying with the help of the script used by the Flying Script Plugin.

Identifying and wrapping the scripts might require some basic coding skills but I was able to do it myself.

I have purified the styles so I am not optimizing CSS with Perfmatters.

Note: Purifying CSS can be a complex task for many WordPress users, and big sites with several styles might make you questions if you really want to do that manually

Perfmatters: Preloading (3)

Instapage will load links before visitors click on them.

I don’t use InstaPage since it is used only to improve perceived performance and that feature adds an additional request to your site.

I am not preloading, pre-connecting, and prefetching anything.

Note: I haven’t tried preloading, pre-connecting, or prefetching anything with the help of code snippets yet. I am sure there is a way.

Perfmatters: Fonts (4)

There have been periods of time in which I haven’t lazy-loaded Images, Iframes, and Videos because I add them way below the fold and WordPress took care of them.

For some reason, the native lazy loading feature didn’t seem to work so I kept most features in this section activated.

Then I figured out that the problem of browsers, not lazy loading my images, iframes, and videos was because the class that tells the browser to do that was missing.

I wrote some code with the help of an AI tool, and added the code to my site with the help of a code snippet plugin,

Now my videos, images, and Iframes are being lazy-loaded without the need for a JS library.

If you don’t have PerfMatters, you can use the LazyLoad Plugin – Lazy Load Images, Videos, and Iframes to handle the lazy loading.

Note: I did some searches and it seems that lazy loading images, videos, and Iframes requires some intermediate coding skills and the use of libraries.

Perfmatters: Fonts (5)

I don’t use Google Fonts, I use the systems fonts so I don’t have to deal with the speed problems Google fonts bring.

Some people might notice a difference but I don’t really see much difference between the system fonts and Google fonts

If you use Google Fonts, this section will come in handy.

Note: It is recommended to use Local Google Fonts.

Perfmatters: CDN (6)

The CDN rewrite option allows you to easily use third-party CDN providers on your WordPress site.

Rewrite means that it will automatically change all of your assets’ URLs on the fly to use the CDN URL

I am using Cloudflare for all things CDN and security so I don’t use anything from this section.

Some users might need it but I don’t.

Note: I have never used an additional CDN for resources such as images. I am not sure if that improves load times when you are using full-page caching or Cloudflare APO.

Perfmatters: Analytics (7)

There are several options that you can play within this section to reduce the impact of Google Analytics.

When I use this speed optimization, I usually go for the minimal inline script type.

If you don’t have PerfMatters, you can use this script to reduce the impact of Google Analytics on your site.

You can add the script to the footer using Elements from GeneratePress or any insert header and footer plugin.

Take into account that the Google Analytics script created by Perfmatters is minified in a better way than the alternative provided by Minimal Analytics.

Note: I have used the minimal analytic script and it works as expected. I just need to check for my pageviews and that’s pretty much it.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of work to maintain code snippets when you have several sites, especially when you are dealing with client sites.

Perfmatters is a great WordPress plugin and there are far more complex sites than mine that might be benefited from using it.

This is not a guide to help users avoid Perfmatters, I didn’t deal with everything it does for my site and what it could potentially do for your site.

Do you know how many hours figuring some of this stuff out for a non-coder?

The plugin is reasonably priced so show your appreciation for the developer of the plugin and buy PerfMatters today.

More about WordPress Speed

I hope that you have found this guide useful

These are other posts that you might want to check out:

1. How to Optimize GeneratePress for Core Web Vitals [100% Solved]
2. How to Lazy Load Ads
3. How to Preload Links in WordPress
4. How to Optimize Table of Contents Plus for Speed
5. How to Use Flying Scripts to Speed up Your WordPress Site
6. How to Use Cloudflare Full Page Caching With WordPress
7. Optimizing WordPress Sites with Autoptimize