In this blog post, let me present to you the NitroPack review.
NitroPack is an all-in-one website optimization tool with high praise from its users.
Its cloud-based approach simplifies speed optimization. It makes sure that you don’t have to rely on multiple tools like W3 Total, WP Rocket, Auto Optimize, or WP Super Cache.
As it is cloud-based, it is platform-independent. This means you can use it on any CMS or website. For WordPress, it offers a plugin that simplifies the installation and configuration process.
It is an interesting approach to site optimization.
With Google’s pushing towards a faster web, it is a no-brainer to optimize your site.
Is NitroPack for you, or does it optimize your site or circumvent Google PageSpeed rankings to show higher numbers?
We’ll answer all of these in our detailed NitroPack review. So, let’s get started.
Features | NitroPack |
Type | Cloud-based website speed optimization service |
Starting price | $17.50 per month |
Best for | One-click speed optimization for your website |
Mobile app 📱 available? | No |
Competitors | Cloudflare, WP Rocket, Speed Kit, Pegasaas, Edgemesh |
Quick Decision
👍 What do I like about NitroPack?
- Swiss-army knife approach: NitroPack streamlines the process of website optimization by offering a solution that requires minimal steps to implement. Rather than installing multiple site speed plugins, NitroPack consolidates all performance optimization tools in one place. This includes caching, comprehensive image optimization, CSS/HTML/JS minification, compression, an integrated Cloudflare CDN, font subsetting, and more!
- In-built Content Delivery Network (CDN): NitroPack eliminates the need for a separate Content Delivery Network, as it comes with a built-in CDN of its own.
- Significant improvement in site speed: Tests reveal that NitroPack can boost your average site speed by a substantial 57%.
- Customizable optimization modes: NitroPack offers varied optimization starting points that are adaptable to any website. Modes include deferring most scripts by default with an option to exclude some or deferring none and choosing what to defer. Specific JavaScript can also be included or excluded for enhanced site performance control.
- Excellent support for eCommerce: NitroPack comes with eCommerce optimized settings, which help to reduce bounce rates and boost sales.
- In-built image optimization: NitroPack also takes care of image optimization, ensuring your visuals load quickly and efficiently.
- Separate optimization for mobile and desktop pages: NitroPack optimizes mobile and desktop pages separately, ensuring the best results for each version.
- Cache warmup feature: NitroPack utilizes a proprietary cache warmup mechanism to speed up page load times for first-time users.
- Ad optimization: With NitroPack, you can optimize your ads so they don’t block the initial render of your site.
👎 What I don’t like about NitroPack?
- Learning curve: NitroPack has a learning curve and may take some time and effort to set up. This is common (if not worse) with any speed optimization plugins. If you’re not technically inclined, the technical terminology can be confusing, but their knowledge base and support are there to help.
- No local deployment: NitroPack is cloud-based, making local deployment impossible.
- Costly tool: NitroPack can be costly for many businesses.
Upfront bottom line
NitroPack is a genuine website optimization service. It enables to speed up websites without relying on multiple plugins.
Its positive impact on Google PageSpeed cannot be ignored as it improves the site’s chance to rank higher.
So, if you’re an eCommerce, course-selling, or affiliate website that wants the best result, NitroPack is a great choice.
Its all-in-one approach is what makes it unique from other solutions out there.
There are other optimization solutions you can try. However, if you’re looking for a simple yet effective optimization, NitroPack is for you.
Overview
NitroPack is an all-in-one site optimization service. It improves Core Web Vitals, giving a positive signal to Google.
Once a user enables the service, they don’t have to worry about changing web performance standards.
NitroPack regularly updates its service to stay on top of performance requirements from Google, most of the times even before similar products in the industry (like WordPress plugins) as they don’t need to deal with plugin conflicts.
That’s not the case with other similar services or solutions such as ShortPixel — as they focus on solving one problem at a time (i.e., optimizing images). They might update their service, but there is no guarantee.
NitroPack, with a decade of operation, has experienced varied reactions. I
nitially, it was lauded for its innovation, but some users raised concerns that NitroPack might be manipulating Google PageSpeed results. This led to accusations of black hat SEO from the Google SEO community.
In response, NitroPack addressed these concerns by refuting 20 false claims. To further solidify their standing, Google and NitroPack collaborated for a webinar, indicating that Google recognizes NitroPack as a legitimate tool!
I completely realized the importance of this tool when I stumbled across this post by Matt where he described the impact of NitroPack on his business.
They’ve got dedicated plugins and tools like:
- NitroPack for WordPress
- NitroPack for OpenCart
- NitroPack for WooCommerce
- NitroPack for Magento
- NitroPack PHP SDK
- API integration
As per the Core Web Vitals Technology Report of, NitroPack is the leading optimization plugin with a high rate of origins passing Core Web Vitals.
Installation
Let us look at the installation of NitroPack on WordPress.
You need to first install their WordPress plugin by heading over to “Add New Plugin”.
Once you activate the plugin, you need to paste in the API key of NitroPack in the NitroPack plugin settings and click Connect.
These credentials can be found in your NitroPack account.
NitroPack review: Features and explanation
NitroPack improves site speed with a plethora of features. Let’s go through them below.
While explaining these features and how they benefit you, I’ll try to compare them with other optimization plugins such as WP Rocket or ShortPixel to give you a clear idea of what to expect.
Performance modes
In plugin configuration these are the important options you need to pay attention to.
When it comes to optimization modes, you have Standard, Medium, Strong, Ludicrous, and Manual mode.
- Standard mode: If you’re looking for stability and speed, the Standard mode is for you.
- Medium mode: A more aggressive mode to Standard that adds image lazy loading and built-in browser techniques.
- Strong mode: If you want more faster load times, then Strong mode builds on top of Medium mode by adding smart resources loading. It also manages to provide stability.
- Ludicrous mode: The ultimate mode that applies all the speed optimization techniques to improve site speed, including deferred JS and advanced resource loading. It also improves Core Web Vitals.
The Strong mode is the default mode.
We recommend sticking to it or the Medium mode. Because the Ludicrous mode is too aggressive in terms of optimization and sometimes may cause some issues with other plugins.
In NitroPack, I appreciate the control it provides over script deferral.
This feature can help optimize individual scripts rather than just keeping the mode set to Ludicrous, which could potentially interfere with your essential scripts.
Alternatively, you can start from a point where nothing is deferred and then make the decision on what to defer. This flexibility allows you to have a better control on the overall performance of your website.
Also enabling to purge the cache when content is updated and published is important.
You can also consider configuring the plugin on your cloud dashboard.
Those will be considered as global configurations and will be overridden by plugin-specific configuration.
NitroPack has released several new widgets to including more information for the users in the dashboard. You can expect more to come.
Note: NitroPack has improved the support for cache proxies making WordPress super compatible with top hosting services like Kinsta, SiteGround, WP Engine, Flywheel, and much more.
Code optimization
NitroPack offers extensive code optimization and code minification features.
By optimizing your site’s code, you’ll instantly see faster load times.
It does it by minimizing the HTML, CSS, and JS file sizes, so they’re delivered and load faster on the browser.
It is a common technique and an effective way to improve site speed.
Additionally, it also defers render-blocking JavaScript by loading only the necessary JavaScript code in the header.
The browser doesn’t have to wait for all the files before showing the web page to the user.
Furthermore, you can also delay scripts (needed by the site to load different features and functionality), improving page speed.
Similarly, it also defers render-blocking CSS.
Once I enabled them, I saw the site’s overall size decrease and impacted the Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals score.
In comparison, WordPress comparison plugins such as WP Rocket, also have similar services where they minimize and defer site files (JS and CSS) to improve site speed.
Critical CSS Generation
Apart from render-blocking CSS and JS, it also tries to optimize site code by generating critical CSS for each unique layout.
But, what is Critical CSS? It is the important CSS needed to load the above-the-fold content (the part of the site that loads first on your screen).
Load times are improved significantly by generating Critical CSS and then including them in the first package received from the server.
If you look for similar services, they charge $10 per month (CriticalCSS.com). So, NitroPack’s all-in-one approach saves you money.
Doing all of these improves PageSpeed and GTMetrix scores.
To compare, WP Rocket lacks CSS deferring or generating CSS for each unique layout. And also its potential conflicts with other WordPress plugins you may have on your website can’t be understated.
Font optimization
NitroPack improves website load times by ensuring the browser doesn’t have to wait for fonts to load.
This is done through two methods:
- Font Preloading
- Font Subsetting
In Font Preloading, NitroPack intelligently identifies critical fonts and pre-loads them. The Font Subsetting technique reduces font file size. However, Font Subsetting is available only on their Scale plan which starts at $146.67 per month.
Image optimization
NitroPack features a complete image optimization package. It seamlessly delivers images by reducing file size using lossy and lossless image compression.
For example, if a user opens the site on mobile, it’ll do preemptive and adaptive image size and only serve the needed size. That means your 1000×1000 image will be resized to, say, 250×250 image to fit the visitor’s screen size, thus saving space.
You can set image quality and preview compression based on your requirements.
NitroPack also supports WebP conversion, which is a more optimized image type.
Additionally, it also defers images that are not required to be rendered from the user’s viewpoint. This advanced lazy loading also includes background images defined in the CSS files.
NitroPack’s higher plans also offer Adaptive image sizing that resizes images based on the weather the site is loading on a phone or a computer. By creating multiple image sizes, it improves multi-device image load times.
In my tests, I found adaptive image sizing useful when loading the site on my tablet and mobile, improving speeds by 20-25%.
NitroPack’s image optimization is good enough for any site. It matches ShortPixel (a dedicated image optimization plugin) in terms of features.
With NitroPack, you can get optimized images in WebP, saving you more space. It is 25-35% smaller compared to JPEGs. Similarly, ShortPixel also supports WebP and optimizes images efficiently.
You can also check out my comprehensive guide on image optimization to delve deeper into the nuances of image optimization and explore additional strategies to enhance your website’s performance.
Smart caching
NitroPack offers advanced caching features to optimize web page delivery.
Caching is the process of pre-loading a site before an actual site requests it. Almost every optimization solution uses caching as a way to serve users.
This improves site loading speed and also frees the server from extensive load, especially during high traffic.
NitroPack uses a cache warmup feature to deliver the webpage removing any delay to first-time users (without it, first-time users will see increased website loading time).
And once you choose to enable it, it’ll ask you to select the type: Standard or Sitemap.
Sitemap is recommended as it enables proper site content discovery making it easy for search engines to discover the site. The Standard mode uses a heuristics approach.
After selecting the mode, it’ll start scheduling the web pages and all you have to do is wait for it to complete.
Also, it implements four different caching mechanisms. These include:
- Browser caching
- Cookie caching
- Device caching
- Session caching
To furnish the best result, NitroPack intelligently picks the right mechanism for serving the users.
This directly impacts Google PageSpeed’s TTFB (Time to First Byte). Its value is reduced significantly improving response time.
NitroPack offers better caching features compared to the free cache plugin offerings and removes the need for a separate caching plugin.
CDN for faster page speeds
As NitroPack is an all-in-one package, it also offers built-in global CDN powered by Cloudflare. It is automatically enabled once you set up NitroPack.
So, if a user is far away from the server, he’ll not receive the site from the main server, but an intermediary CDN near to his location.
It’s like delivering the cached site from the nearest possible CDN server.
These edge locations ensure optimal site delivery and make a site faster on a global scale.
Overall, I like the built-in CDN feature. Generally, services like WP Rocket don’t include built-in CDN and require you to subscribe to third-party services.
Depending on your needs, you might need a paid CDN option, which can add cost to speed up your site. But, if you choose NitroPack, you get it automatically without paying anything extra.
Core Web Vitals (CWV) optimizations
NitroPack excels at Core Web Vitals optimizations.
Core Web Vitals is Google’s idea to give website owners metrics to understand their website performance.
Google recommends optimizing Core Web Vitals for optimal performance, visual stability, and interactivity.
But, why does it matter? Well, without optimizing Core Web Vitals, Google may devalue your site in terms of user experience.
NitroPack improves Core Web Vitals significantly by optimizing site code to match Google’s guidelines.
The results are so good, that initially there were a lot of skepticism regarding what NitroPack does under the hood.
But NitroPack has already explained how they optimize the Google PageSpeed Insights score.
eCommerce Cart optimization
NitroPack optimizes eCommerce carts to improve sales.
It uses an eCommerce Cart cache to improve cart loading time intelligently.
By storing cart items in the local cache, the page doesn’t have to rely on the server for response to load the cart page.
That’s because the cache already knows what to load.
Hence, the cached web page versions are loaded with added items, improving customer satisfaction and resulting in faster checkout.
User Interface and User Experience
NitroPack offers a web app for users to manage and set up the site. If you’re on WordPress, you can install their WordPress plugin.
Once you log in to NitroPack, you’ll notice a clean dashboard.
I like it as it welcomes you to add your website.
Once you add it, it’ll recommend the steps to enable NitroPack.
For me, it is WordPress, so it asked me to install the WordPress plugin.
Once connected, the NitroPack WordPress plugin lets you change settings, see live updates, and run diagnostics.
I like NitroPack’s intuitive interface, as it lets you toggle features with a single click.
It also guides you if you’re a new user, ensuring smooth integration with your site.
Lastly, I also liked the Purge all cache option. It can bring your site back to normal if things break.
Compatibility and Integrations
NitroPack has done a great job at ensuring compatibility and integration with various platforms. You can use it with WordPress (4.7 or above), WooCommerce, OpenCart, and Magento.
In addition, it also works with other site optimization plugins such as Cloudflare, Sucuri, and Reverse Proxy Solutions such as NGINX. However, in some cases, you’ll need to configure settings to make them work.
NitroPack also works with different hosting platforms, including Kinsta, Cloudways, Siteground, and Pagely.
You can also integrate NitroPack on a custom website with the help of API integration.
If you’re having any problems with NitroPack compatibility or integration, check out the Compatibilities page for quick resolution.
My results with NitroPack
I recently installed NitroPack on my website.
Fortunately, by keeping the NitroPack review in mind, I documented the entire process and results.
I checked the PageSpeed of my website before and after installing NitroPack.
Here are some of the things we kept in mind while testing:
- We tested the PageSpeed in Google Chrome’s “Guest” mode where all our extensions were not active.
- We deleted the cache of the page for which we were testing PageSpeed (just in case).
- We had only CDN and caching mechanisms set in place at a time.
- No changes were made to our website whatsoever through this test – except for disabling the CDN and caching plugins to conduct the test.
WPX hosting default CDN vs NitroPack
A little bit of background.
I’m hosting my websites on WPX hosting. It comes with WPX Cloud CDN functionality. I was also using WP Fastest Cache (which delivered better results than W3 Total Cache for me).
I checked the PageSpeed of my website homepagebefore installing NitroPack with the above configuration, and here are the results:
Now let’s test for mobile.
Now, I disabled the WPX Cloud and also deactivated the “WP fastest cache”.
Because the NitroPack I installed will replace all of their functionalities.
I repeated the same tests on my homepage, this time with NitroPack active.
Next for mobile.
You can see my Google Pagespeed score increased as intended.
I’m sure that with more improvements on my site, plugins, and also experimentation with different NitroPack modes, I can further improve these scores.
Now, I’ve checked one of my blog posts that were ~5,000 words.
This time, let me use GTMetrix.
I repeated the same tests.
Now, let me analyze the same post which I’ve analyzed previously before installing NitroPack.
As I told you before this post is ~5,000 words with plenty of images and GIFs.
This post was taking a whopping 7 secs to load, but now 3.0 secs.
That’s a 57% increase.
As you can see, both the homepage and my blog post’s pagespeed time decreased drastically.
When I saw in the GTMetrix’s waterfall report, the major contributor for faster pagespeed was code minification and optimization.
I saw a significant reduction in load times for JS and CSS files, especially for the plugins that I’m using.
Sign up for NitroPack free plan and test yourself
Experimenting with NitroPack vs. WP Rocket
While I was experimenting with NitroPack on my site, a friend suggested that he would attempt to achieve similar outcomes using WP Rocket and my WPX Cloud CDN.
Oh, I thought, why not?
I can save a monthly subscription if I can accomplish this without NitroPack, right?
I decided to give it a shot.
We optimized our website in various aspects.
We did:
- Deactivating many plugins (replacing them with code)
- We moved our custom CSS to the child theme
- We resized some important images
- Many other optimizations
Now we want to test WP Rocket + WPX Cloud CDN and NitroPack alone (as it comes with CDN)
We installed WP Rocket with almost all performance settings on – except CSS minification as we are using HTTP-2 (enabling that option broke our site). We documented the test results.
We then deleted WP Rocket, disabled WPX Cloud, and activated NitroPack on our site.
Here are the test results for the homepage that’s optimized WP Rocket
Now we disabled WP Rocket, and optimized the homepage with NitroPack.
As you can see, the NitroPack website homepage loads 1 second faster than WP Rocket, taking only 1.4 seconds. Additionally, its total page size is significantly smaller than that of WP Rocket.
Now we tested how NitroPack stacks well against WP Rocket when it comes to a blog post.
You can see NitroPack resulted in a significant difference in speed and page size. It almost doubled our speed in some cases.
WP Rocket costs $49/year while NitroPack is $228/year.
For smaller sites with less than 5000 views, NitroPack’s free plan is available, unlike WP Rocket which is premium.
NitroPack also includes a CDN, which is an extra cost with WP Rocket which sells it separately as RocketCDN costing $7.99/month.
NitroPack is more on an all-in-one solution.
Pricing and Support
NitroPack follows a freemium pricing policy.
If you want to test out NitroPack, then you just need to create an account and log in.
The free plan has its limitations, including:
- Up to 5000 pageviews and 1 GB CDN bandwidth per month.
- A NitroPack badge is added at the footer of the site.
- Shared resources among multiple sites using the same NitroPack plan.
As for the paid option, NitroPack offers three plans:
- The Business Yearly plan starts at $17.50 per month. It offers 50,000 page views with 25 GB per month of CDN bandwidth.
- The Growth Yearly plan starts at $42.50 per month with 200K page views and 100 GB per month CDN bandwidth. This plan also supports adaptive image sizing and 3 team members.
- Lastly, the Scale Yearly plan starts at a staggering $146.67 per month. It is aimed at big sites with huge traffic. It offers 1000K page views with 500 GB per month of CDN bandwidth. It supports up to 10 team members. Also, it supports adaptive image sizing and font subsetting.
If I were you, I would start with a free plan and see how it goes. If you’re looking to invest long-term, then yearly plans are more value for money as you get 2 free months with it.
Irrespective of the plan you choose, you get all the NitroPack features, excluding the adaptive image sizing feature (available in Growth and Scale ) and font subsetting (available in Scale plan).
Lastly, if you’re an enterprise or managing multiple sites, you can contact them for custom pricing plans and demos.
All the plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
As for support, you can contact NitroPack through email. Their knowledge base is adequate for most issues, along with their help center.
Also, more recently, they implemented 24/7 support coverage and improved their support quality, which is quite good.
Security
NitroPack offers excellent security through its robust infrastructure. It follows industry-standard security to ensure complete peace of mind.
Under the hood, it uses SSL/TLS (HTTPS). Also, it creates copies of original files for processing.
They process data in encrypted format, ensuring no data leaks. Also, all website data is only processed without analyzing or storing purposes.
Competitors and how NitroPack compared to them
In this section, we look at NitroPack’s alternatives.
- 10Web Booster: 10Web is a good choice for WordPress-powered websites. The booster is AI-powered and improves Core Web VItals and PageSpeed scores. It offers built-in security, a full website cache, and Cloudflare Enterprise CDN.
- WP Rocket: WP Rocket is a well-known WordPress performance optimization plugin. It offers a plethora of optimization options, including caching, minification, image optimization, and CDN.
- Sucuri: Sucuri offers excellent CDN and web application firewalls for your website. Choose Sucuri if you want the best security for your web app.
- ShortPixel/Imagify: Two great alternatives to NitroPack. Both offer top-notch image optimization at decent pricing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is NitroPack?
It is a website performance optimization solution that is cloud-based.
Is NitroPack SEO-friendly?
According to my above experiment, NitroPack increased our website speed on average ~57% (refer the above analysis for more exact metrics)
Is NitroPack compatible with Cloudflare?
Yes, NitroPack is compatible with Cloudflare. But you need to disable some of the Cloudflare features like Mirage, Rocket Loader, and some others for a smoother experience.
Is NitroPack compatible with WordPress?
NitroPack is a cross-platform cloud-based tool. It has its own WordPress plugin which I reviewed in one of the above sections.
What CDN does NitroPack use?
NitroPack makes use of Cloudflare for spreading your optimized static assets across various servers for faster page load times.
What if NitroPack is breaking my site? How to fix it?
If NitroPack breaks your site, you can fix it by purging the cache, removing unused CSS features, or using a less aggressive optimization mode. You can also switch to custom mode to set optimization options yourself.
Verdict
NitroPack is an excellent choice for websites looking for an all-in-one optimization solution.
It improves your Core Web Vitals & PageSpeed scores, directly impacting website conversions and SEO.
If you’re a business in lead generation, product-selling, or affiliate field, then NitroPack is an excellent pick.
However, it is not for everyone, as their plans can be costly.
That’s why, I have listed the NitroPack alternatives you can check and decide for yourself.
The best way to know if NitroPack is for you or not is to sign up for their free plan and give it a test ride.