Welcome to my new article! Today, we will review and analyze NitroPack - a website speed optimization tool. NitroPack is a great solution to improve performance and increase your website loading speed. Join me to explore the features and benefits of NitroPack!
What Is Nitropack?
NitroPack is a website speed optimization tool developed by a team of leading technical experts. Using intelligent compression, image optimization, and caching techniques, NitroPack helps reduce website load times and increase user experience. It’s focused on helping users improve their site speed and pass the Core Web Vitals test.
Its most significant benefit is how easy it is to deploy.
In most cases, you’ll just need to install the plugin on your site, and you’re done. With automatic HTML, CSS, and JS optimization, on top of their CDN and image optimization, you’re guaranteed to get results in under 5 minutes And if you don’t, Nitropack has dozens of features and tools to help you customize it and pass the Core Web Vitals.
NitroPack performance data
Let’s be honest. This is the main reason you’re reading this NitroPack review, right?
When it comes to website performance optimization tools and plugins, nothing else matters more than exactly how much faster your website will be.
I’ll cover specific features in a moment. First, I’ll cover my approach to running these NitroPack tests. Then, we’ll dig into the performance data.
Performance test methodology
To test NitroPack’s performance, I took my trusty WordPress demo site and used it to run some before/after tests from different locations.
My test site is hosted on WPX Hosting and uses Kadence theme. To add some “weight” and make the test more realistic, I installed Kadence Blocks and imported one of their site templates. I then added some additional plugins such as social sharing and SEO plugins for good measure.
WPX Hosting offers their own global CDN but that is disabled on my test site.
My chosen speed test tool is WebPageTest. The best performance testing tool I’ve tried so far. In addition to giving different metrics for “load time”, it also includes data for Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative, which became a search engine ranking factor in 2021.
The Core Web Vitals metrics measure load times as they apply to user experience, not just a single “load time” metric. Because a lot of NitroPack’s optimizations focus on improving these metrics (e.g. by inlining critical CSS), I think they’re another important piece to pay attention to.
For my test configuration, I used the following:
- Test Location: Chicago, Illinois AND Mumbai, India (to see how the CDN performs)
- Browser: Chrome.
- Connection: Cable 5/1 Mbps 28ms RTT. This will get a slower result than a tool like Pingdom, but it’s more accurate to how actual human visitors will experience your site because it’s closer to the average Internet speed for the USA as a whole.
- Number of tests to run: “3”. WebPageTest will run three separate tests and take the median value, which eliminates single-test variability.
I’ll also run my test site through PageSpeed Insights because I know that a lot of people care about PageSpeed Insights scores. Don’t obsess about scores by themselves, though. What really matters is how your human visitors experience your site.
In terms of NitroPack’s settings, I’m using the Ludicrous mode which offers most optimizations automatically. However, you can definitely squeeze faster times out of your site by setting up some of the optional optimizations in your dashboard.
For example, if you’re running ads, you’ll want to try activating the “Optimize Ads” setting.
Here’s how it performed – I’ll start with the raw page speed data and then summarize everything at the end of this section:
WebPageTest – Virginia, US
No performance optimization (control)
With NitroPack
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As a quick note, we’re not seeing much movement in cumulative layout shift because my test site isn’t running any lead generation forms or ads. If that were the case, we’d likely see improvements in this metric, thanks to the CSS optimization functionality & other optimizations running in the background.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Some of the core metrics that PageSpeed Insights offers have been covered in the WebPageTest.com tests above.
So, here I’ll just give you the individual PageSpeed scores just in case you’re curious.
Without NitroPack
Mobile:
Desktop:
With NitroPack
Mobile:
Desktop:
Test conclusions
Ok, I know that I spat a lot of technical information at you in previous sections. If you’re not a website performance pro, that might’ve felt a little overwhelming. So here’s the human-friendly conclusions from all that test data:
NitroPack made a huge improvement to my site’s page load times in all areas:
- The overall page load times decreased, which is what most people care about.
- The speed index metric was reduced significantly. This is the time it takes for your page to look usable.
- The Core Web Vitals Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric improved, which means your visitors will be able to see your site’s most important content faster (which should lead to a better experience). According to my tests, it was over 3x faster with NitroPack.
- The time to first byte (TTFB) decreased, which means the server responded faster.
- The page weight (file size) decreased significantly. This means that no matter what connection your visitors are using, you’ll see faster site speeds.
- The PageSpeed Insights scores greatly improved.
Nitropack Features
When it comes to website performance optimization, here are some of the features that NitroPack offers you.
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.
Nitropack Pricing And Support
Nitropack is expensive. That’s one of its most significant drawbacks, so we don’t recommend it if you’re just getting started with your site.
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As you can see, Nitropack gets more and more expensive the bigger your site is. For an average site of 50k visitors, you can expect to pay $21/month for Nitropack. And it can get as expensive as $176/month for big sites.
They also have discounts if you pay for an entire year in advance and a free version for tiny sites to give the software a try.
But don’t judge the prices in a vacuum. Think about what you’re getting for your money.
It’s not just a classic web performance plugin that minifies your CSS and JavaScript. It does that, and a ton more on top. Nitropack is an all-in-one solution for improving your site speed and passing the Core Web Vitals.
So What About Support?
When writing this Nitropack review, we contacted support with a question about deployment. They got back to us in under 15 minutes and solved our issue.
NitroPack pros and cons
Now, let’s take a quick look at NitroPack’s pros and cons:
Pros
- Improves your site speed and Core Web Vitals significantly – My performance tests showed that NitroPack can improve performance significantly with ‘out of the box’ settings. You could see more performance gains by activating additional optimizations.
- Easy to use – Performance optimization doesn’t get any easier than this. NitroPack leads the way in this area. Use pre-set optimization modes to select how heavily you want to optimize your site.
- Supports advanced optimizations – While NitroPack is incredibly simple to use, that doesn’t mean it’s a basic tool. It supports advanced optimizations such as Font Subsetting and adaptive image sizing.
- Does the job of multiple tools – You don’t need to be using 4 or 5 different tools to run the optimizations you want (e.g. caching, CDN, image optimizations, etc.) – You can do it with a single tool.
- All features available on all plans – There are no features hidden behind higher plans. Pricing is determined by usage limits only.
- Great support – This is highly subjective but my experience with NitroPack’s support has been a positive one.
- Free plan – There’s a free plan that will be enough for small sites. This does come with branding but you can get that removed by becoming a beta tester. You’ll also get increased usage limits as well.
Cons
- Doesn’t work with all content management systems – There is support for WordPress, OpenCart, and Magento. But it would be nice to see more integrations in the future.
- Site removal could be easier – Currently you can request a site to be removed but it has to be handled by NitroPack support. It would be nice to see this process streamlined so users can remove sites easier.
- JavaScript issues – Some users report issues with JS heavy sites on the Ludicrous setting. These issues can be avoided by adjusting settings in your account and adding exclusion rules for the offending JS files.
Final Thoughts
Multi-tasking optimization plugins for WordPress sites and other platforms are a boon to site owners. There are many options available, but we can definitely recommend NitroPack as one of the best all-around tools for unlocking new levels of site speed.
Once installed, you will notice a big difference in your site’s responsiveness because of all the individual site aspects that NitroPack can improve. If you investigate a little deeper over time, you will probably find an uptick in your search ranking as well.
While it’s not a user-friendly tool for inexperienced site owners, the power NitroPack delivers can be worth the effort of surmounting its steep learning curve. And, with an array of differently priced plans, you can likely find a way to leverage it that won’t take too big of a bite out of your budget.