Astute Speed fixes the things that most often hold back Largest Contentful Paint on a blog or news site, the Core Web Vital Google measures for how fast a page appears.
Free, unlimited, on your own server
- WebP copies. The resized copies phones download are saved as WebP, about a third smaller. Your originals keep their format, so social previews still work everywhere.
- See how much smaller your images can be. The Images screen lists your heaviest images. Preview one and Astute Speed makes a resized, re-saved version and shows it beside the original with both file sizes. Download it and use it in place of the original. Your images are never changed by the plugin. No monthly cap.
- The first image loads first. The featured image at the top of a page is loaded at once, at high priority, and preloaded, even when a lazy-load plugin would hold it back.
- Hero images in sliders and page builders are found and preloaded too, and a check shows what the plugin can do for each type of page.
- Ads and analytics held back. AdSense and Google Tag Manager can wait until the visitor scrolls, taps or types, so the page renders first. Off by default.
With a free connection to the Write & Grow speed service
- Critical CSS for your posts. The service opens a sample post in a real browser at phone, tablet and desktop widths and keeps only the CSS the first screen needs. Astute Speed prints it inside each post and loads the full stylesheets in the background. Free sites get one run a month for single posts.
- Better image compression previews for 100 images a month: the service's encoders make the same image smaller still, PNGs included.
A security check, too
- PHP errors and the debug log. Warns in Site Health and on the Page Speed screen when visitors can see PHP errors, debug mode is on, or wp-content/debug.log can be read from the web, and shows the lines that fix each one.
A licence adds critical CSS for the homepage, pages and archives, more runs and more images. Everything that runs on your own server stays free and unlimited.
Works alongside WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache and other caching plugins. If WP Rocket's own "Load CSS asynchronously" is on, Astute Speed's critical CSS stands down so the two never both rewrite a page.