johanee

On posts and pages with comments the most timeconsuming part in page creation is translating the smilies to images!
This has now been fixed in WordPress 2.8-bleeding-edge, but if you are not using that (and in production you probably shouldn’t, yet!), this plugin gives you the speedup anyway.
It replace smilies_init with a new one that constructs a more efficient regular expression, resulting in 10 ggr faster handling of smilies replacement.
Note: it uses the ‘e’ modifier to preg_replace to avoid patching any core files. Not all hosts allow this.
<h3>Performance</h3>
A page with 25 comments on an otherwise empty WordPress 2.7 got created on average 28% faster!
Profile of filters on 2.6.5 without plugin on a page with 403 comments:
<pre><code> Total: 7.052s, Filters/Actions: 5.856s (83%), Db: 0.033s (0.5%)
 1. convert_smilies (calls: 403, total time: 3.911s (55.5%))
 ...
</code></pre>
Profile with plugin:
<pre><code> Total: 3.439s, Filters/Actions: 2.174s (63.2%), Db: 0.036s (1%)
 ...
 4. convert_smilies (calls: 403, total time: 0.357s (10.4%))
 ...
</code></pre>
More than 50% faster!

Faster Smilies

Make WordPress posts 20-50% faster, in one step. Not needed for 2.8+.

Cloudways

Breeze is a free, simple (yet powerful) and user-friendly WordPress Caching Plugin developed by the Cloudways team. It offers various options to optimize WordPress performance at various levels. It works equally great with WordPress, WordPress with WooCommerce and WordPress Multisite.
Breeze excels in the following areas:
<ul>
<li>
Performance: Breeze improves website speed and resource optimization. Other features include file level cache system, database cleanup, minification, support for Varnish cache and simplified CDN integration options.
</li>
<li>
Convenience: Breeze is easy to install and configure directly from WordPress. Configuring Breeze is easy and most of the default options work well right out of the box. The recommended settings should work on all your WordPress websites seamlessly.
</li>
<li>
Simplicity: Breeze is designed to be simple for all users. Just install and activate the plugin and you’ll see the results instantaneously.
</li>
</ul>
What makes Breeze WordPress Cache Plugin awesome is that it comes with builtin support for Varnish. If Varnish is not installed on your servers, Breeze will utilize its internal cache mechanism to boost up your WordPress site performance.
FEATURES
<ul>
<li>Seamless integration with Varnish Cache for efficient content delivery. No manual adjustments needed – all settings come pre-configured for your convenience.</li>
<li>Optimize performance using Cloudflare’s caching capabilities. No specific Breeze configurations are needed – it works out of the box.</li>
<li>Effortlessly integrate your preferred Content Delivery Network (CDN) for global content distribution with Breeze instead of using the the CDN providers’ plugins.</li>
<li>Trim WordPress database bloat effortlessly. Breeze’s Database Options optimize and declutter your database, boosting performance by removing unneeded data like post revisions and trashed content.</li>
<li>Take command over caching exclusions. With Breeze, you have the power to prevent specific URLs, JS files, and CSS files from being cached.</li>
<li>Achieve smaller page sizes and faster load times through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript minification, including inline CSS and JavaScript minification.</li>
<li>Load images when they’re visible, not all at once, for faster webpage performance by implementing lazy loading for images.</li>
<li>Load JS files with deferred loading, enhancing overall performance.</li>
<li>Supercharge your site’s speed with Breeze’s advanced preloading features: load fonts early, quicken link clicks, and enhance DNS requests for a seamless user experience.</li>
<li>Master real-time interactions with Breeze’s Heartbeat API management. Fine-tune notifications, sales data, autosaves, and more to optimize WordPress performance by adjusting API call frequencies.</li>
<li>Effortlessly manage Breeze settings using Import/Export. Download your configurations as a .json file for backup, or effortlessly import existing settings to quickly fine-tune your optimization.</li>
</ul>
Support: We love to provide support! Post your questions on the WordPress.org support forums, or if you are a Cloudways Customer you may ask questions on the <a href="https://community.cloudways.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Cloudways Community Forum</a>.
<h3>Requirements</h3>
PHP 7.4, PHP 8 recommended for better performance, WordPress 6.0+

Breeze – WordPress Cache Plugin


Hey, for quick and effective page caching, go for this plugin – it's great with or without Varnish or Cloudflare CDN. No need to mess around with CSS and JS; there's another plugin for that, doing the fancy stuff. Stick to this one for caching, and let the other one handle the techy bits. Easy peasy!


I suggest using it for Page Caching only, not CSS & JS optimization


Not bad, but you have to add the next features, without it, it's just another cache plugin.




Remove unused css!!!



Better support to CDN with exclude / include custom directory and files



And maybe, checking the plugin performance when the minify option is enabled.




Thanks


Not bad... But you have a work to do.

Breeze is a WordPress Caching Plugin developed by Cloudways. Breeze uses advance caching systems to improve WordPress loading times exponentially.

Faster Smilies vs Breeze – WordPress Cache Plugin