NitroPack Review 2024: Is It the Best Speed Optimization Tool?

Are you struggling with a sluggish website and looking for a solution to boost its performance?

In this digital era, where speed is king, a fast-loading website is crucial for maintaining visitor engagement and achieving high search engine rankings.

This is where NitroPack comes into play. It’s a cloud-based performance optimization tool that offers features like a CDN, code minification, caching, lazy-loading, etc, to help you speed up your website.

In this NitroPack review, we will look at the following:

• What Nitropack is & how it works
• NitroPack performance test
• How NitroPack speed up your website
• How to configure it
• How much does NitroPack cost
• Nitropack pros & cons
• Nitropack alternatives

By the end of this review, you’ll have a good understanding of whether NitroPack is the best speed optimization tool for your website or not.

Let’s dive in!

What is NitroPack?

NitroPack is a powerful web performance and speed optimization tool designed to improve your site speed and ensure you pass the Core Web Vitals test. Its standout advantage is the ease of deployment. Simply install the plugin, and it starts working immediately.

With features like automatic HTML, CSS, and JS optimization, as well as CDN and image optimization, you can see noticeable improvements in load times within minutes.

If further optimization is needed, NitroPack offers a comprehensive suite of tools and features. These include CSS code minification, lazy image loading, and cache optimization for shopping carts to ensure your site achieves optimal performance.

Try NitroPack Free

Who Is NitroPack For?

NitroPack is a web optimization solution for website owners with a large number of assets. If you already used basic optimization strategies, NitroPack is the solution.

It is best suited for those with high traffic who want to improve their website’s speed and performance.

NitroPack optimizes the website’s resources, such as images, scripts, stylesheets, etc, to improve page load times, decrease bounce rates, and enhance user experience.

NitroPack Review: Performance Test

The most efficient way to analyze a website performance tool is to figure out how much it increases website performance, right?

So, to test NitroPack’s website performance, we created a fresh WordPress website hosted on Bluehost and installed the Astra theme.

Then, we added some demo content by importing a bunch of dummy pages, posts, images, etc, through the Starter Template plugin. We ensured no other performance plugins were activated on the test site besides NitroPack.

To run the tests, we used Google PageSpeed Insights to compare performance benchmarks before and after running NitroPack.

Below are the results from PageSpeed Insights.

Before NitroPack:

Before we optimized our site’s performance, we performed a test without NitroPack to get a baseline. Here is what PageSpeed came back with:

On Mobile:

On Desktop:

These criteria were not too bad to start with, but there was clearly space for improvement. So, let’s have a look at what happened when we installed Nitropack.

After NitroPack:

We now install NitroPack and configure it to the default “Ludicrous” settings. Furthermore, we tweaked certain custom configuration options to enable extra optimizations that were not enabled by default, such as ‘reduce unneeded CSS’ and ‘delay scripts.’

Here are the results of that test on PageSpeed Insights.

On Mobile:

On Desktop:

As you can see, performance increased significantly in Ludicrous mode.

Without a doubt, these tests seem to show that NitroPack performs what it claims to do and dramatically increases the page performance of your website.

Try NitroPack Free

How Does NitroPack Speed Up Your Website?

Okay, you now know that NitroPack can significantly enhance your website’s page load times. So, how does it do this?

Again, the most notable feature of NitroPack is that it provides an all-in-one solution for speeding up your website. Instead of installing various WordPress performance plugins, you can just install NitroPack, and you are done.

Here are some of the most effective strategies it uses to speed up your website.

1. Advanced Caching Mechanism

NitroPack offers a range of caching solutions to boost performance and reduce server load. The two most common are page caching and browser caching:

• Page caching saves the static HTML version of a page so that your server does not have to perform PHP with each visit.
• Browser caching saves certain static resources on a visitor’s local computer so that they don’t have to download them every time the page loads.

Furthermore, NitroPack also offers smart features such as cache invalidation, which ensures that as many visitors as possible get cached copies of your content. Plus, there is also a cache warmup feature.

In addition, you can also disable caching for certain content/resources if needed. For example, if you run an online store, you’ll need to exclude your cart and checkout pages.

2. Image Optimization

Images account for over half of the file size of the average webpage, so finding ways to compress them is an excellent way to speed things up.

NitroPack automatically optimizes your images by converting them to the faster WebP format and lazy loading them.

In addition, advanced techniques are covered as well. For example, preemptive image sizing and adaptive image sizing.

3. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

NitroPack is a web optimization service that provides a set of tools for improving website performance and speed. One of its main features is the global CDN that it offers to its users. This is also one of the reasons behind the high pricing.

The NitroPack CDN is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world’s most popular cloud computing platforms. AWS is well-known for its strong and dependable infrastructure, which many notable websites and services use.

NitroPack’s CDN allows you to spread your website’s content over several servers across the world. This reduces latency and load time for those visiting your site from different locations. Plus, the CDN can help with traffic surges and improve the overall security of your website.

4. HTML Optimization

NitroPack offers several features that will automatically optimize your website’s HTML code. As a result, faster and lighter pages.

Among these features is HTML minification, which eliminates unneeded spaces, comments, and other characters from your HTML code, reducing its size and speeding up the loading process.

In addition, NitroPack also offers HTML compression, which decreases the size of your HTML code and improves page performance.

By a combination of these features, you can significantly improve your website’s speed and user experience.

5. CSS Optimization

NitroPack offers advanced CSS optimization that significantly improves your website’s performance.

Firstly, NitroPack minifies CSS files, stripping out unnecessary characters like whitespace and comments, thereby reducing file size without altering functionality. This streamlined version of CSS files loads faster, contributing to reduced page load times.

Additionally, NitroPack intelligently identifies and separates ‘critical’ CSS – the minimum set of styling required to render the visible portion of a webpage. Loading this critical CSS first ensures that users see a styled page quickly, improving perceived loading speed. The rest of the CSS loads asynchronously, preventing it from blocking the rendering of the page.

Furthermore, NitroPack can combine multiple CSS files into a single file and decrease the number of HTTP requests needed, which is another factor in speeding up page loading. These CSS optimization techniques are crucial for improving site speed, a key factor in user experience and SEO performance.

NitroPack’s approach to CSS optimization is both comprehensive and automated, making it a valuable tool for website owners and developers looking to enhance site speed without delving deep into technicalities.

6. JavaScript Optimization

JavaScript optimization isn’t that impressive. Nitropack will handle JS automatically during deployment, as it does with CSS and HTML.

You can exclude some files from being loaded (such as JavaScript, CSS, and images) and delay script loading.

It’s not a common issue to fix, although it does up on Google Pagespeed Insights from time to time. If your site is having trouble with JS load, delaying some scripts can help.

7. Font Optimization

NitroPack’s font optimization focuses on web fonts, which might slow down your website’s load time due to its large file size. Or the browser needs to make an additional trip to a third-party server to get them.

Here are some major components of NitroPack’s font optimization:

• Font Preloading: NitroPack detects and preloads important fonts. This way, the browser knows which font files are required for page rendering and starts requesting them as soon as possible. Preloading reduces the Flash of Unstyled Text (FOUT) or Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT) effect.
• Font Subsetting: This feature is available only to Scale subscribers. It minimizes the amount of font files that your website needs to load. Font subsetting is essentially the process of deleting unneeded characters from a font file, reducing its size and making it faster to download and render.

8. Integrations

Nitropack features many integrations and add-ons that can improve your experience and website performance. You can, for example, integrate with reverse proxy services such as (Varnish, NGINX, etc). You can also integrate with Sucuri and Cloudflare.

What we most like is their Optimize Ads feature.

Ads can significantly slow down a page and, in particular, affect CWV scores such as CLS.

Nitropack, in our experience, is one of the few solutions that can help you with this. Their Optimize Ads feature effectively maintains good site speed scores for ad-containing sites.

How to Configure NitroPack

First, you’ll need to create a Nitropack account. You can choose either a paid or a free plan.

NitroPack plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

NitroPack supports several out-of-the-box content management systems. This includes WordPress, OpenCart, and Magento.

Our site is built on WordPress. Therefore, we’re going to focus on that CMS in this review.

Simply go to your WordPress dashboard and install the NitroPack plugin. If you haven’t installed any WordPress plugins previously, check out how to install WordPress plugins.

Once installed, go to Settings » NitroPack and connect your WordPress site with NitroPack.

And that’s it. You can successfully connect your site with NitorPack.

This is one of the core benefits of NitroPack – it’s incredibly easy. We’d even say it’s one of the easiest optimization tools we’ve ever used.

But how do you configure NitroPack?

While NitroPack provides a basic dashboard within your WordPress site with a few settings, you’ll handle most things from NitroPack’s cloud dashboard rather than your WordPress site.

Let’s go there next.

NitroPack Settings

The best thing about NitroPack is that you don’t even have to “configure it.” It basically works out of the box.

Even if you go with the default settings, you’ll notice significant improvements in site performance and Core Web Vitals.

If you want to dive further, navigate to the Settings tab in your NitroPack dashboard.

Then, using the Configuration slider, select the level of optimization you want. NitroPack will automatically set some or all of the features we discussed above based on the level of optimization you select.

For example, if you select the Strong tab, it will include features like advanced lazy loading and font optimization.

If you are a casual user, you are done! Just stop; you don’t need to go any farther than choosing your desired optimization level.

If you want to take things a step further, you can activate the Ludicrous option to unlock additional NitroPack features.

NitroPack Pricing

NitroPack offers four pricing plans, each of which is priced for a single site.

• Free Plan: This is an excellent way to start since you can quickly see whether the service will speed up your website. The free plan limits you to 5000/mo pageviews and 1GB/mo CDN bandwidth.
• Business: It costs you $17.50/mo (billed annually) and gives you 50,000/mo pageviews and 25GB/mo CDN bandwidth.
• Growth: It costs you $42.50/mo (billed annually) and gives you 2,00,000/mo pageviews and 100GB/mo CDN bandwidth.
• Scale: It costs you $146.67/mo (billed annually) and gives you 1,000,000/mo pageviews and 500GB/mo CDN bandwidth.

Custom plans are available on request. Plus, all NitroPack plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Try NitroPack Free

NitroPack Review Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Quick and easy to install and use.
• Automatic optimization for HTML, CSS, and JS.
• Comprehensive image optimization toolset.
• It supports eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce, Magento, etc.
• Built-in global CDN.
• Free plan to test out.

Cons:

• Pretty expensive.
• Track record of outages.
• Customer support could improve.
• Limited CMS support and doesn’t work with platforms like Shopify or Squarespace.
• There have been complaints about NitroPack breaking sites with heavy JavaScript usage.

NitroPack User Reviews

Before purchasing a premium plugin, it is usually good to read user reviews.

On the WordPress.org plugin repository, NitroPack got 4.4 out of 5-star ratings from more than 280+ reviews.

On Trustpilot, the NitroPack plugin got 4.9 out of 5-star ratings from more than 680+ reviews.

NitroPack Alternatives

There are many good alternatives to NitroPack. For this NitroPack WordPress plugin review, we will take a closer look at two of them.

1. WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that significantly enhances your website speed and performance. Designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, it is user-friendly and requires minimal technical knowledge to set up and configure. It is used by over 3.8 million websites.

Learn more in our complete WP Rocket review.

The main features are:

• Page Caching
• Cache Preloading
• Static files compression
• Database optimization
• CDN integration
• Lazy loading of images

WP Rocket Pricing:

WP Rocket price ranges from $59/year for a single site to $299/year for unlimited sites.

Try WP Rocket

2. Perfmatters

Perfmatters is a lightweight WordPress performance plugin that optimizes WordPress performance.

The plugin provides several features that can be enabled or disabled with a few clicks, requiring no coding skills.

The Perfmatters WordPress plugin is great for disabling unnecessary features, optimizing WordPress settings, and improving site speed.

Learn more in our complete Perfmatters review.

The main features are:

• Script Manager
• Change your WordPress login URL
• Preloading resources
• Database optimization
• CDN rewrite
• Lazy loading of images

Perfmatters Pricing:

Perfmatters price ranges from $24.95/year for a single site to $124.95/year for unlimited sites.

Try Perfmatters

WordPress Plugins

You should also consider these free WordPress plugins as NitroPack alternatives.

• W3 Total Cache: This plugin is known for its extensive caching capabilities, which can significantly improve website loading times. It includes features like page cache, object cache, database cache, and browser cache.
• WP Super Cache: Developed by Automattic, this plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. It serves cached files in three ways: mod_rewrite, PHP, and Legacy caching, catering to different user segments.
• Autoptimize: It focuses on optimizing your site’s CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. It can aggregate, minify, and cache scripts and styles, inject CSS into the page head by default, and defer the aggregated full CSS and defer or async scripts.

Final Thoughts on Our NitroPack Plugin Review

This ends our in-depth NitroPack review.

After trying NitroPack, we are confident that NitroPack is the best website optimization tool available right now.

Its unique selling point is its ease of setup. You don’t have to mess with the setup to get it to work properly. It just works out of the box.

It optimizes every part of your website with a single click, from HTML and CSS minification to image optimization and everything in between. That makes it great for beginners who aren’t very tech-savvy and prefer a simple, hassle-free option.

And the results speak for themselves. In our tests, it improved overall website performance and cut page loading time by seconds.

But don’t take our word for it. You can test NitroPack out for yourself with their Free plan. Just click the button below to sign up.

Try NitroPack Free

For more, check out these other helpful resources:

• NitroPack vs WP Rocket Review
• 10 Best WordPress Cache Plugin
• How to Speed Up a WordPress Site
• How to Clear WordPress Cache

Lastly, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay updated on the latest WordPress and blogging-related articles.