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.

Why speed matters for SEO. Core Web Vitals are part of the page experience signals Google uses in Search, and a slow first screen loses visitors before they read a word. Astute Speed fixes the usual causes. No plugin can promise rankings, but a fast page gives your content a fair chance.

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.

Everything that runs on your own server stays free and unlimited. Astute Speed Pro, the paid upgrade, adds critical CSS for the homepage, pages and archives, more runs and more images, and a complete SEO plugin: SEO titles and descriptions, XML sitemaps, IndexNow, schema and redirects. Details: https://writeandgrow.com/astute-speed-pro

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.

External services

Astute Speed connects to the Write & Grow speed service (writeandgrow.com) for the features below, and only after an administrator connects the site on Astute Speed Account and agrees. Nothing is sent before that, and nothing about your visitors or users is ever sent.

Connecting sends this site’s address and its WordPress, PHP and Astute Speed versions, so the service can issue the site a key and apply the right allowance. To prove the request comes from your site, the service then reads a one-time code back from your site (the astute-speed/v1/verify REST route, which answers only during those few seconds).
Critical CSS sends the address of one sample page of the type you ask for (for example your newest post). The service opens that page as a visitor would, makes the CSS and sends it back.
Better image compression sends the image file you choose to preview. It is compressed, sent back and not kept by the service.
The Account, Images and Critical CSS screens ask the service for this month’s usage.

Disconnecting on the Account screen stops all contact with the speed service at once: critical CSS still being made is cancelled, and the plugin makes no further request to the service until an administrator connects again. Critical CSS already on your site keeps working.

Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google AdSense. Astute Speed does not load these services and sends nothing to Google. If another plugin or your theme already adds their scripts to your pages, the optional “Hold back ads and analytics” setting (off by default) makes those existing scripts wait until the visitor scrolls, taps or types, or six seconds pass. The plugin only recognises them by their addresses (googletagmanager.com/gtag/js, googletagmanager.com/gtm.js and pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js); when they then load, the visitor’s browser contacts Google exactly as it would without Astute Speed, under the arrangement the site owner has with Google. Google’s terms: https://policies.google.com/terms — Google’s privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Your own site. The speed check on the Page Speed screen and the debug log check read pages of your own site, from your own server. Nothing is sent anywhere else.