AccelerateWP launches in free and premium versions
AccelerateWP comes from CloudLinux as a new solution for improving the performance and optimisation of WordPress.
At its core it is very similar to what plugins such as WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache offer, but several features make it a worthy competitor. For one, it analyses websites for optimisations they would benefit from and reports them in the AccelerateWP section built into cPanel, through what it calls Smart Advices, so you can act on them and apply the optimisations in a few clicks.
It also comes in two "flavours": the free version and the premium version.
Key features of the free version
- Static page generation
- Preloading (built-in crawler)
- Browser cache
- Site-wide cache retention settings
- User-specific content cache
- REST API cache
- Mobile cache support
- Cache integration with Cloudflare
- Exclude pages from optimisation
- Code minification
- Deferred JavaScript loading
- Database optimisation and cleanup
- Delayed JavaScript execution
- WP-cron optimisation
- Google Fonts optimisation
- HTTP/2 Push
- Lazy loading for images, embedded videos and iframes
- Bring your own CDN (with CDN mapping)
Key features of the premium version
- Object cache with Redis
- Critical CSS (CCSS) generation service
- Asynchronous CSS loading
- Image optimisation
- Free CDN (up to 1GB per user)
The Premium version costs €3/month. That is expensive compared with other cache plugins, especially since our services include LiteSpeed Cache, probably the most complete plugin on the market, fully integrated with the web server we use (LiteSpeed) to get every last bit of performance, and all for free.
So why offer AccelerateWP? There are two reasons. First, the free version of AccelerateWP is very easy to set up and has a minimal learning curve, without the large number of options that some users find overwhelming in LiteSpeed Cache. That makes it a perfect fit for projects that want that performance boost quickly and without complications.
Since September 2024, Redis is available as an object cache for free. See the guide to Redis in WordPress for more information.
And the Premium version has a differentiating feature that can be very useful for large projects: object caching with Redis.
Object caching with Redis is the best persistent object cache available in terms of read/write speed and memory usage. AccelerateWP creates a dedicated Redis instance for your account where it stores the results of database queries to deliver dynamic content significantly faster, which can be very useful for high-traffic projects or projects with resource-heavy queries.
In 99.9% of cases we will keep recommending LiteSpeed Cache, but AccelerateWP can be very useful for specific projects: the free version for users who want to set up a cache system easily and without friction to improve performance, and the Premium version for projects that need an object cache with Redis.
We cover all of this in more detail in the AccelerateWP manual.