What is xSpeed? #
xSpeed is a caching and performance plugin for WordPress, built by WPDeveloper. It speeds up your site by saving your pages as ready-made files and serving them to visitors as fast as your server can.
What this does #
When someone visits a normal WordPress page, the server has to run PHP and query the database to build that page from scratch every single time. That takes work, and work takes time.
xSpeed removes most of that work. The first time a page is requested, xSpeed builds it once and saves the finished HTML as a static file. Every visitor after that gets the saved copy instead of rebuilding the page.
On top of page caching, xSpeed also trims your code, compresses files, defers images and fonts,
and cleans up your database. You turn on what you need, and the settings save automatically.
How page caching works in xSpeed #
xSpeed uses static-file serving for its fastest cache path. Here is the idea in plain terms.
- A visitor requests a page.
- xSpeed saves the finished HTML to a static cache directory under wp-content/cache/xspeed-static.
- The next visitor’s request is matched by a rewrite rule your web server reads first.
- The server hands back the saved HTML file directly, before WordPress (and PHP) even loads.
Because PHP never runs on a cache hit, the response comes back in roughly 5 to 15 milliseconds instead of around 85 milliseconds for a PHP-served cache.
