DietPress is a free WordPress speed optimization plugin with a built-in page cache. Page caching, browser caching, GZIP and Brotli compression, deferred JavaScript, critical CSS, image loading attributes, preloading, locally hosted Google Fonts and selective asset loading, all in one plugin and all free.

And it goes further than a caching plugin: it also puts WordPress itself on a diet, switching off the features your site never uses. It pairs that with a clean, risk-based interface. Everything is configurable, the optimizations are already on by default, and nothing is hidden behind a paid tier. Activate it and your site is faster, or open the settings and tune every detail.

By default WordPress loads functions, services and scripts that most sites do not need. They slow down loading times and consume hosting resources. DietPress lets you trim that fat and apply battle-tested performance tweaks, with a clear description of what each option does and what might break, organized by risk level so you always know what is safe.

WHY CHOOSE DIETPRESS

Page caching, for free. Serve anonymous visitors a copy stored on disk instead of building the page again. The feature people buy WP Rocket or a NitroPack subscription for, with no licence and no monthly fee.
Served by your web server, not by PHP. With the accelerator on, Apache or nginx hands out the stored copy by itself, without starting PHP or WordPress, and so can LiteSpeed when the test passes there. It is tested on your home page before it stays on, and cached pages still expire on time.
No drop-in, no changes to wp-config.php. Unlike WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, DietPress installs no advanced-cache.php and never edits wp-config.php. Switching it off leaves your site exactly as it was, with nothing orphaned behind.
It tells you why. Most cache plugins leave you guessing when nothing is cached. DietPress reports its own status, tests itself against your home page, and names the exact reason a page was skipped.
WooCommerce-safe by design. Carts, checkout, my account and any visitor carrying a cart cookie always get the live site, so nobody ever sees somebody else’s basket.
Diet as well as speed. Where Perfmatters focuses on disabling scripts, DietPress covers that ground and adds page caching, critical CSS, local Google Fonts and a dashboard, admin and email cleanup, in one plugin.
Light on your server. No account, no external service, no telemetry, no upsell nags. Everything runs on your own hosting.

WHAT THE PAGE CACHE DOES TO YOUR RESPONSE TIME

Measured on a WordPress 7.1 install with Astra, WooCommerce and 29 active plugins, PHP 8.5 and Apache, taking the median of 15 requests per URL. Your own hosting will give different figures, but the shape of the result will not change.

Server response time for the same pages without the page cache, with the page cache served by PHP, and with the accelerator:

Home page – 112.3 ms without, 13.7 ms with the page cache, 3.0 ms with the accelerator
A blog post – 105.5 ms without, 14.9 ms with the page cache, 3.0 ms with the accelerator
WooCommerce shop – 117.2 ms without, 14.9 ms with the page cache, 3.8 ms with the accelerator

The interesting part is not the percentage, it is that the cached figures barely move. Serving a stored file costs the same whether the page was cheap or expensive to build, so the saving grows with the size of your site rather than with the power of your server. The accelerator also takes away the start of WordPress itself, which is most of what a page served from the cache by PHP still costs.

It also changes how much traffic your hosting can take at once. In the same test the home page went from about 17 visits a second without the page cache to 159 with it and 732 with the accelerator, more than forty times as many, on exactly the same machine. That is what keeps a small site standing up when one of your posts does well.

TWO THINGS IN ONE PLUGIN

1. Performance optimizations (on by default)

Automatic Critical CSS inlined in the head (optional experimental deferral of non-critical CSS)
JavaScript defer parsing with smart dependency handling
Image loading attributes safety net: lazy loading, decoding=async and fetchpriority for images that bypass core
Automatic image dimensions for better CLS scores (including picture elements)
Resource hints: preconnect and DNS prefetch for common third-party origins
Theme stylesheet, critical fonts and logo preloading for a faster LCP
Google Fonts display=swap
Google Fonts local hosting: serve the fonts your theme uses from your own server, GDPR-friendly with a silent fallback to the Google CDN (opt-in)
Selective third-party loading: WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, block library, Slider Revolution, TablePress, Smash Balloon, Formidable Forms and Everest Forms assets only load where they are used (opt-in)
RSS feed optimization (cache headers and item limit)
Server rules in .htaccess: browser caching with a configurable lifetime for media, for styles and scripts and for fonts, GZIP and Brotli compression, immutable cache headers, CORS for fonts and keep-alive (master switch plus per-feature toggles)
Database maintenance: daily expired-transient cleanup and safe query optimizations
Page cache: store each page on disk and serve it to anonymous visitors without building it again, with automatic purging, gzip precompression, a cleanup schedule you choose and a status panel that says whether it is working, plus an accelerator that lets Apache or nginx serve those pages without starting PHP (opt-in, in its own tab)

2. Put WordPress on a diet (risk-based, opt-in)

Light (safe for any site): emojis, RSD/WLW tags, shortlinks, self-pingbacks, comment pagination, and more
Moderate (evaluate first): oEmbed, jQuery Migrate, Dashicons on the frontend, Global Styles and Duotone, remote block patterns, avatars and Gravatar, comment threading, and more
Strict (site-specific): granular RSS feed control, Heartbeat API mode, post revisions and autosave, disable comments, XML sitemap, native lazy loading/fetchpriority, content types, selective loading for WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, block assets, Slider Revolution, TablePress, Smash Balloon, Formidable Forms and Everest Forms, and more
Widgets: dashboard widgets (including third-party ones from Yoast, WooCommerce, Elementor, Jetpack, Wordfence, Rank Math, Gravity Forms), classic sidebar widgets, block-editor widgets and the Customizer
Emails: silence the automatic emails WordPress sends on its own, grouped by area: auto-update results for core, plugins and themes (plus the new-version notice), comment moderation and new-comment notices, and new user, password and email-change notices, plus toggles for the admin email verification prompt and post-by-email. Every option is off by default, and critical notices such as a failed core update are always kept

SCALE, PROFILES AND ANALYZER

Savings indicator: HTTP requests removed, CSS/JS saved and active optimizations at a glance
Quick profiles: Personal Blog, WooCommerce Store, Landing Page and Maximum Cleanup
Site analyzer: personalized recommendations based on your active plugins and content, page cache included
Import and export your whole configuration as a JSON file

COMPATIBILITY AND EXTENSIBILITY

The plugin includes filters for developers:

dietpress_critical_css – Customize the inline critical CSS
dietpress_critical_css_handles – Define which CSS handles are critical
dietpress_skip_defer_script_handles – Opt scripts out of the JavaScript defer
dietpress_skip_defer_style_handles – Opt stylesheets out of the CSS deferral
dietpress_preconnect_hints – Customize preconnect origins
dietpress_dns_prefetch_domains – Customize DNS prefetch domains
dietpress_critical_fonts – Define critical fonts to preload
dietpress_exclude_local_fonts – Exclude Google Fonts stylesheets from local hosting
dietpress_selective_{module}_has_content – Mark a page as showing the content of a selective loading module, so its assets are kept. The module is wc, cf7, formidable, everest_forms or revslider
dietpress_selective_{module}_styles / dietpress_selective_{module}_scripts – Adjust the handles removed by each module
dietpress_selective_page_hides_content – Mark a page as rendering content the content scan cannot reach, so no module removes anything (this is what handles Elementor)
dietpress_selective_is_wc_page – Override the WooCommerce page detection of selective loading
dietpress_selective_wc_keep_cart_fragments – Keep the cart fragments script when your theme has a hand-coded mini-cart
dietpress_selective_cf7_has_form – Mark pages that load a Contact Form 7 form dynamically
dietpress_selective_blocks_dequeue – Override the block library dequeue decision
dietpress_selective_everest_forms_dequeue_dashicons – Keep Dashicons when another plugin enqueues it directly
dietpress_native_sitemap_in_use – Tell DietPress your plugin builds on the native WordPress sitemap, so the option that removes it becomes unavailable
dietpress_cache_bypass – Keep the current page out of the page cache
dietpress_cache_bypass_request – Keep a request away from the page cache altogether, before anything is read from disk
dietpress_cache_bypass_accept – Adjust the media types that keep a request out of the page cache
dietpress_cache_bypass_cookies – Adjust the cookie name prefixes that make a visitor uncacheable
dietpress_cache_ignored_params – Adjust the query parameters that do not change the page
dietpress_cache_exclude_urls – Adjust the excluded URL patterns
dietpress_cache_post_urls – Adjust the URLs purged along with a post

Compatible with:

Well-coded themes and page builders (Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Bricks Gutenberg)
Cache plugins (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, etc.). The one exception is the optional page cache module, which will not run beside another page cache and says so; everything else in DietPress works alongside them as it always has
Security plugins (DietPress focuses on performance and deliberately leaves security to them; we recommend our free Vigilant). With the page cache accelerator on, the pages the server serves by itself skip what they do in PHP, as the FAQ explains
CDNs (Cloudflare, StackPath, KeyCDN, etc.) thanks to CORS and Vary headers. Behind a CDN or proxy, the page cache needs WordPress to know when a visit arrives over HTTPS, and the Cache tab tells you when it does not
WordPress Multisite (except the optional page cache module, which does not support it yet)

HOW TO VERIFY THE OPTIMIZATIONS

Cache rules: check your .htaccess for a block marked # BEGIN DietPress with immutable Cache-Control headers
Page cache: open a page in a private window and look at the X-DietPress-Cache response header: HIT-STATIC when the server served it without PHP, HIT when PHP served it from the cache, MISS when it was built
Accelerator rules: on Apache or LiteSpeed, your .htaccess has a block marked # BEGIN Page Cache by DietPress right before the WordPress block
Logo preload: view page source and look for <link rel="preload" ... fetchpriority="high"> pointing to your logo
Critical CSS: view source and look for <style id="core-diet-critical-css"> in the head
Compression: test at giftofspeed.com/gzip-test

Always measure with tools like Google PageSpeed, GTMetrix or WebPageTest, and run each test at least twice to account for caching.

Support

Need private support or custom development?

Do you need one-on-one help, priority troubleshooting, or a custom feature, integration, or tweak built specifically for your site? I offer private support and custom development. Just contact me and tell me what you need.

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About AyudaWP

We are specialists in WordPress security, SEO, AI and performance optimization plugins. We create tools that solve real problems for WordPress site owners while maintaining the highest coding standards and accessibility requirements.