If you have a website, how quickly it loads is going to play a big role in how successful your website will be. That is to say, site speed is an important aspect that makes a good website. Your website can’t attract high traffic unless it can grab the visitor’s attention as soon as they visit your webpage. A slow-loading website will lead to unhappy visitors and result in a higher bounce rate. Consequently, those will affect your website’s search engine ranking and organic traffic.  

Various factors slow down your site speed, such as heavy image files, uncompressed code, JavaScript issues, excessive HTTP requests, and not using CDN service. To overcome those issues, you might want to use caching tools and CDN tools that can automatically optimize your website. Here we will review NitroPack, a performance optimization tool that improves site speed. 

Getting Started

NitroPack is a cloud-based website performance optimization plugin that optimizes your website performance. This means that NitroPack performs all optimizations in the cloud. So, it is a very lightweight solution with a lower CPU overhead compared to standard caching plugins. 

Specifically, NitroPack will help you get a 100/100 Google PageSpeed score and fix all your Core Web Vital in a couple of clicks. Reviewers said that this tool has sped up their websites by around ~57% on average.

NitroPack was initially developed as a downloadable plugin in 2012. Until the beginning of 2021, over 20.000 sites rely on NitroPack for fast load times and great PageSpeed scores. 

Since 2012, it has sped up 85.000+ websites on the internet. Its service is integrated with WordPress, OpenCart, WooCommerce, Magento, and other platforms. Custom integrations are also easy with its developer API. 

What Does NitroPack Do?

NitroPack makes your website load faster.  It does that by combining:

• Web performance best practices
• Standard optimization techniques
• Advanced features, implemented in unique ways.

To take advantage of NitroPack, you simply create an account and connect your site to NitroPack. After that, NitroPack servers handle the heavy load of performing optimizations to boost your website loading time.

How Does NitroPack Work?

In contrast to other plugins, the way NitroPack tackles two of the web’s biggest problems, the large number of resources per page and JavaScript execution, is unique.

NitroPack preloads lots of assets away from the main thread by utilizing modern CPU’s multi-core architecture. It uses a cloud-based service to optimize heavy operations like code minification, compression and image optimization. As a result, the plugin doesn’t weigh down your website and effectively boost the loading time.

What Are The Features of NitroPack?

When it comes to optimizing website performance, NitroPack works to accelerate your website with its core features, such as:

Code Optimization

For reducing the file loading time, NitroPack offers really good features to compress and minify the various files using: JS Compression, JS Minification, CSS Compression, CSS Minification, HTML Compression, HTML Minification. These features enable your website to load faster because of the optimized code.

Image Optimization

Not only providing code optimization, but NitroPack also provides an image optimization. NitroPack optimizes your uploaded images with: Deferred Offscreen Images, Container-specific Image Resizing, Deferred Offscreen Images, Image Lazy Loading, Next-Gen Image Formats like WebP for space savings

These features help you serve the optimal size of images according to the user’s device as and when necessary.

CDN

NitroPack has the support of Amazon CloudFront CDN, which is now the fastest CDN on the internet. With this, all your static assets like optimized code and images will be served from Amazon’s high-speed servers for faster page loads.

If you’re already using other CDN providers like MaxCDN or KeyCDN, you don’t need to use them anymore as NitroPack already provides you with that. 

Smart caching

NitroPack provides a great good caching mechanism, including Browser-aware Caching, Cookie-aware Caching, Warm-up Caching, Device-aware Caching, Session-aware Caching. All of these mechanisms make sure that the cache is intelligently loaded based on the browsers, cookies, devices, and user sessions thus enhancing your visitors’ browsing experience. This helps you improve response time/TTFB (Time To First Byte) in terms of page speed.

Additional features like:

Besides all the above features, there are other features in NitroPack. They are world-class proprietary speed algorithm, HTML, CSS, and JS minification & compression, Critical CSS, DNS prefetching, preloading, and more. 

Why Should I Use NitroPack?

There are some reasons why you should use NitroPack for your website.

It is an all-in-one website optimization service

NitroPack has everything you need for a fast website including built-in global CDN (powered by Amazon CloudFront), world-class proprietary speed algorithm, HTML, CSS and JS minification and compression, critical CSS, DNS prefetching, preloading, and more. You don’t need to install separate CDN, caching plugins, code optimization plugins, and image optimization plugins.

The biggest advantage here is that all the actions happen in the background without requiring active intervention on your part. Moreover, NitroPack is focusing on improving your Google page speed score and it means you will get potential higher search engine rankings. 

A lightweight website optimization 

NitroPack functions on a cloud-based infrastructure. In other words, it doesn’t rely on your website’s RAM and CPU to carry out complex and heavy optimization tasks. This is great because it lets your web server resources be utilized for website visitors and minimizes the risk of damaging your website’s original files. 

Page Speed Scores guarantee

NitroPack offers a guaranteed PageSpeed score. Specifically, 90+% for desktop and 75+% for mobile. 

Compatible with existing WordPress infrastructure

NitroPack works on all WordPress hostings and page builders, such as Cloudflare, Varnish, Sucuri, WPEngine, SiteGround, Kinsta, Cloudways, GoDaddy, Elementor, and many more. In addition, you can integrate it with WordPress, OpenCart, WooCommerce, Magento, and other platforms. For custom integrations, you can get it through NitroPack’s developer API. 

eCommerce compatible

NitroPack was explicitly built for large e-commerce stores and high-traffic situations. It is perfect for that because NitroPack has two powerful features:

• Cache Invalidation & Cache Warmup – automatically schedules new cache file generations, once the cache is purged or invalidated.
• Marketing Campaign – NitroPack recognizes campaign parameters in the URL and ignores them when looking up a cache file for the campaign request.

Whether you’re running a big campaign or your site suddenly becomes trending, both features are crucial for keeping your visitors happy. 

Easy-to-use & setup

NitroPack does not require you to be well-versed in coding. It simply works in the background and handles all the technical stuff. Additionally, it is very easy to install and configure, and results show up almost immediately. All site speed features are built-in, and there are no other plugins required. 

It is a free and also paid service

NitroPack has a free optimization service suitable for low-traffic websites. But, if you want to get wider variations of features you can opt for NitroPack paid plans that start from $17.50/ month. 

Is NitroPack Free?

Well, NitroPack does have a free optimization service that you can use without charges. However, if you need advanced features to optimize your overall website performance, there are several premium plans offered by NitroPack.

How Much Does NitroPack Cost?

NitroPack has 3 premium plans based on the number of your web page views per month. The billing selection also differentiates the pricing so you can choose monthly to yearly billing.

NitroPack’s pricing:

50.000 Pageviews

• Monthly: $21/ month
• Yearly: $17.50/ month

200.000 Pageviews

• Monthly: $51/ month
• Yearly: $42.50/ month

1.000.000 Pageviews

• Monthly: $176/ month
• Yearly: $146.67/ month

How to Setup NitroPack?

Nitropack is not a WordPress plugin, it’s a cloud-based optimization platform. It indeed comes with a WordPress plugin for installation and configuration if you are on WordPress. 

To get NitroPack, first, you need to register for a NitroPack account. Open NitroPack website. There’s a free and premium plan from which you can choose. You can try the 14-day free trial for the premium plans. Make sure to enter the URL of your WordPress site when signing up.

Second, install the NitroPack plugin from WordPress.org.

Third, go to Settings → NitroPack in your WordPress dashboard and click the Connect to NitroPack button. 

We recommend you to not use NitroPack together with another caching plugin because it can hinder NitroPack performance.

How to Use NitroPack?

Pros

• All-in-one website speed optimizer
• Easy to use and setup
• Compatible with WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, etc
• Recommended for eCommerce website 

Cons

• Doesn’t work with other caching plugins
• Often minifies useful CSS and JavaScript in custom-coded website 
• May disable Google AdSense and reduce ad revenue
• Takes time to update new changes 

What Are the Alternatives to NitroPack?

Other than NitroPack, there are several website performance optimization tools that you can use as NitroPack alternatives:

• WP Rocket – premium site optimizer plugin
• W3 Total Cache – complete framework for free site speed optimizer
• WP Super Cache – simple yet super caching tool for site speed optimizer
• Autoptimize – free site speed optimizer plugin with decent features.
• Docker Cache – site speed optimizer plugin with advanced object caching
• Fast Velocity Minify – HTML, CSS & JS optimization plugin for developers and advanced users
• LiteSpeed Cache – all-in-one site speed optimizer plugin with exclusive server-level cache

Conclusion

NitroPack is a performance optimization tool that improves site speed. It works on different aspects of your website to boost its Google PageSpeed score. Moreover, it is compatible with a wide range of platforms, including WordPress. The best part is that you don’t have to be a pro web programmer to use NitroPack since it is extremely easy to use. Also, NitroPack is both suitable for personal and high-traffic websites. The premium plans provide features that are compatible with eCommerce websites. We recommend you to use the free NitroPack for your website and upgrade it to premium when your traffic starts to get busy. 

References

• NitroPack WordPress Plugin
• NitroPack Official Website
• 7 Tests and the Results Are Out: NitroPack Review 2021 – Bloggingx
• Speed Up Your Website With One Tool (NitroPack Review) – Blogging Wizard
• The Plugin That Makes Your Website Load Lightning Fast (NitroPack Review) – Hustlr
• NitroPack vs WP Rocket 2021 – WP City