In this blog post let me present to you the review of NitroPack.

NitroPack is a great cloud-based performance optimization tool for speeding up your website. Unlike other tools, you can make use of this service to speed up your websites no matter what CMS you are using.

If you’re running your website, you may already know about various caching tools and also CDN tools. In WordPress, you may already be aware of the tools like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, Autoptimize, etc.

But 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.

Chances are that you are on this blog post because you’re tired of using dozens of tools to improve your Google Pagespeed score.

You know what?

Let’s face it.

Improving the Google mobile and desktop page speed score just seems impossible. You may sometimes even feel that unless you implement Google amp the score can’t be improved.

But that’s simply not true.

NitroPack is a great performance optimization tool that’s aimed at improving your website performance by making use of CDN, code minification, caching, lazy-loading, and much more.

I was surprised by the results I got from NitroPack. I had no option but to review it.

Apart from the page speed increase, NitroPack has got its own quirks which I’ll discuss in this review.

Type	Performance optimization plugin
Free plan available?	Yes. Give it a test drive
Best for	To improve the website’s Google page speed – Test your site performance
Features	Google-PageSpeed-focussed Optimization Amazon CloudFront integration JavaScript compression CSS minification Cache Invalidation – Explore NitroPack features
Starting price	$19/month. (Get 2 months free with annual prepay) – View all the pricing plans
Compatibility	NitroPack is compatible with popular hosting providers, plugins, and services. – Check NitroPack compatible tools & services
NitroPack dedicated plugins	NitroPack for WordPress NitroPack for OpenCart NitroPack for WooCommerce NitroPack for Magento
Competitors	WP rocket Jetpack Perfmatters Autoptimize
Explore	Explore NitroPack

Pros

• NitroPack really is an all-in-one website performance plugin. It replaces your CDN, caching plugin, code optimization plugins, and also image optimization plugin.
• As per our experiments, NitroPack increases your website speed by an average of 57%. If you are not using any CDN, then you can expect even more!
• More page speed equates to more conversions.
• As NitroPack comes with CDN and caching features, you’ll save good money if you are on metered hosting.
• NitroPack has really good eCommerce support with plugins for WooCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, etc.
• NitroPack is focused on improving your Google page speed score and it equates to potential higher search engine rankings. If you want to test your site’s Google page speed score, you can try here.

Cons

• Some of their modes might be too aggressive for certain websites.
• Your website audit tool can report certain issues when you have NitroPack installed on your site. Again, you may want to play with some of their settings and modes that I’ll discuss to get around this.

NitroPack overview and installation

NitroPack is a website performance optimization plugin that’s compatible with any type of website.

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

Even if you are non-techy, you can make use of their plugins to easily integrate NitroPack with your website. If you are a newbie and have no idea of where to you can watch the demos by clicking on the links below.

As per the Core Web Vitals Technology Report of August 2021, NitroPack was the leading optimization plugin with a high rate of origins passing Core Web Vitals.

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 site ID and site secret on the settings page of the plugin.

These credentials can be found in your NitroPack account.

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.

The Strong mode is the default mode.

We recommend sticking to it. Because the Ludicrous mode is too aggressive in terms of optimization and sometimes may cause some issues with other plugins.

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.

NitroPack review: Features and explanation

When it comes to website performance optimization, here are some of the features that NitroPack offers you.

Code optimization

For any decent website to load, there are multiple files that need to be loaded like JS files, CSS files, etc.

NitroPack offers really good features to compress and minify the various files.

Here are some of the features:

• JS Compression
• JS Minification
• CSS Compression
• CSS Minification
• HTML Compression
• HTML Minification

These features enable your website to load faster with optimized code.

Along with these, there are features like Defer JS loading and also Key Requests Preload. They help in faster speed index and also faster painting, which is crucial for boosting the page speed score.

Image optimization

NitroPack also does a really good job of optimizing your uploaded images.

It has features like:

• 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.

I really liked the container-specific image resizing functionality, which dynamically resizes the images as per the visitor’s viewport size. That means, your 1000×1000 image will be resized to say 250×250 image so as to fit the visitor’s screen size thus saving space.

It also supports the usage of next-gen image formats like WEBP which carries the benefits of both JPG and PNG.

CDN for faster page speeds

NitroPack also comes with support with Amazon CloudFront CDN, which is now the fastest CDN you can get your hands on.

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 making use of any CDN providers like MaxCDN or KeyCDN, you don’t need to use them.

For example, in my case I needed to disable the “WPX Cloud” CDN feature as NitroPack already offers CDN that’s enterprise-grade.

I don’t really recommend you to make use of multiple CDNs on your single website as it may cause resource conflicts and may result in breaking your site.

If you are using Cloudflare on your website, here’s the good news.

NitroPack integrates perfectly with Cloudflare. But you need to consider disabling some features of Cloudflare like Mirage & Rocket Loader and also tweak some settings.

Smart caching

NitroPack comes with really good caching mechanisms.

Here are some of the features when it comes to caching:

• Browser-aware Caching
• Cookie-aware Caching
• Device-aware Caching
• Session-aware Caching

These different mechanisms make sure that the cache is intelligently loaded based on the browsers, cookies, devices, and user sessions.

Generally, the cache is generated the very first time the user visits any page. For any consecutive visits, the cache will be served thus enhancing their browsing experience.

You have good control over your cache. You can purge them whenever required, you can set expiry, etc.

They also have a cache warmup feature which automatically schedules new cache file generations, once the cache is purged or invalidated. You have really a good number of settings, especially URL related settings you can configure in this area.

This kind of caching mechanism helps you tremendously to improve response time/TTFB (Time To First Byte). It is one of the crucial metrics you need to consider improving when it comes to getting a good Google page speed score and experience for the users browsing your page.

This feature alone replaces the use of caching tools and plugins.

My results with NitroPack

I recently installed NitroPack on my website.

Fortunately, by keeping publishing of this NitroPack review in mind, I documented the entire process and results.

I checked the pagespeed of my website before installing NitroPack and after installing it.

Here are some of the things we kept in mind while testing:

1. We tested the pagespeed in Google Chrome’s “Guest” mode where all our extensions were not active
2. We deleted cache of the page for which we were testing pagespeed (just in case)
3. We had only CDN and caching mechanisms set in place at a time.
4. No changes were made to our website, whatsoever, through this test – except for disabling the CDN and caching plugins to conduct the test

Before installing 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 (that delivered better results than W3 Total Cache for me).

I checked the pagespeed of my website before installing NitroPack with the above configuration, and here are the results:

Below is the GTMetrix report of my homepage:

The homepage is taking 5.5 secs to load – according to ultra-fast GTMetrix Canadian servers. It may not seem a lot, but considering the fact that most of the people around the world are still using slower internet connections, the time can be much more for them – maybe 2x or 3x

After GTMetrix, I also checked the pagespeed using “Lighthouse”, web tool you can access here, or using inspect feature in Chrome.

Now, I’ve checked one of my blog posts that were ~5,000 words.

After installing NitroPack

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.

The first is for the homepage.

As you can see, the homepage’s pagespeed has been increased by 2.6 secs (47% pagespeed increase). This is due to code optimization, enterprise-grade CDN, and much more.

You can see my Google Lighthouse performance score also 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, 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.

It means, crazy conversions!

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.

Experimenting with NitroPack vs. WP Rocket

As I was testing out NitroPack with my site, my friend approached me and suggested he would try to get similar results with WP Rocket and my WPX Cloud CDN.

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.

Homepage results

Blog post results

You can see NitroPack resulted in a significant difference in speed and page size. It almost doubled our speed in some cases.

When you compare the price of WP Rocket with NitroPack, the WP Rocket costs you $49/year, whereas NitroPack costs you $228/year (as of now).

If you have a small website, NitroPack costs you less than $288/year. With the sites with 5000 page views or less, NitroPack free plan is available. Whereas WP Rocket is a premium plugin and doesn’t have any free plan.

So that’s a $179 extra. Because NitroPack also comes with a CDN which WP Rocket charges you extra as RocketCDN.

Nevertheless, due to the doubling of speed, even if it makes me $179 extra it’s worth the price I paid. It’s an investment.

Because of our cognitive bias “absence blindness”, and inability to track the boost in conversions due to speed doubling, we feel that it is a costly deal.

Even if it means that with NitroPack I need to disable my WPX Cloud CDN feature I bought it. Because, I think there’s no similar solution in the market comparable to NitroPack.

Pricing and support

NitroPack is a freemium tool.

Along with free plan, it offers 3 premium plans based on the pageviews.

For 50,000 pageviews and 25 GB CDN bandwidth it costs you $21/mo. For the site with 200,000 pageviews per month, 100 GB CDN it costs $51/mo.

If you want to save huge, I recommend you to choose their annual subscriptions. You will get 2 months free on yearly plans.

All these plans comes with features like:

• World-class proprietary speed algorithm
• Automatic Google PageSpeed optimization
• Advanced caching mechanism
• Complete image optimization stack
• HTML, CSS and JS minification & compression
• Built-in global CDN

When it comes to support, as I told you, for premium plans they’ve got free installation and configuration.

They’ve got email support. They also have a good support knowledge base that’s highly detailed. They have recently redesigned their help center with new content for you to resolve the issues quickly.

They also have a 14-days money-back guarantee if you don’t like their service.

FAQs

Verdict

Increasing your pagespeed is really important when it comes to boosting your website conversions and also SEO.

NitroPack is a no-brainer if you have lead generation, affiliate, or product-selling websites. The boost in conversions is absolutely worth the money you spend on it.

Along with that, if you are on metered hosting, NitroPack saves you good money as it reduces the overhead on your hosting servers.

Depending on the price of the product you’re promoting, even one extra sale would pay back all your investment apart from SEO benefits.

I hope you loved my NitroPack review.

If you’re still not sure whether to go with NitroPack or not, please go ahead and sign up for their free plan and give it a test ride.