A2 Optimized WP – Turbocharge and secure your WordPress site

Boosting performance and securing your WordPress site has never been easier with the A2 Optimized WP plugin from A2 Hosting. Get customized desktop and mobile performance scores for your site, including:

• Server speed (Time to First Byte)
• Page load speed (Largest Contentful Paint)
• User perception (First Contentful Paint)
• Visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift)
• Website browser speed (First Input Delay)

Using these scores, A2 Optimized WP generates specific, personalized recommendations for improving your site:

• Performance
• Security
• Best practices compliance

With just a few clicks you’ll give your WordPress site the boost it needs with stable, industry-proven optimizations and improvements.

Vulnerability disclosure program

Performance optimizations

Our plugin is optimized to work best in the A2 Hosting environment, so items marked with an asterisk (*) are only available for sites hosted at A2 Hosting. If you are not an A2 Hosting customer, join today!

Page caching
* Allows site visitors to save copies of your web pages on their device or browser. When they return to your website in the future, your site files load faster.
* This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) and reduces bandwidth usage.

Gzip compression
* Turns on Gzip compression to make text files smaller.
* This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) and reduces bandwidth usage.

Redis object caching (*)
* Stores commonly used elements such as menus, widgets, and database sets in memory.
* This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB).

Minify HTML pages
* Removes extra spaces, tabs, comments, and line breaks from HTML pages.
* This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID).

Automatic database optimizations
* Periodically cleans MySQL databases of expired transients (a type of cached data used in WordPress) as well as trashed and spam comments. Also optimizes database tables.
* This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) for uncached pages.

Compress images on upload (*)
* Automatically compresses images when they are uploaded to your site.
* This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and First Input Delay (FID).

Turbo Web Hosting (*)
*Takes advantage of A2 Hosting’s Turbo Web Hosting platform to provide faster serving of static files, pre-compiled .htaccess files for improved performance, PHP opcode caching, and more.
*This optimization can improve multiple benchmarks.

Use system cron instead of WordPress cron (*)
* Replaces the WordPress virtual “cron job” with a genuine, system-defined cron job.
* This optimization reduces the load on WordPress and ensures scheduled tasks run at precise, correct intervals.

Minify inline CSS and JavaScript
* Removes extra spaces, tabs, comments, and line breaks from inline CSS and JavaScript.
* This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID).

Disable WooCommerce AJAX Cart Fragments
* Disables WooCommerce AJAX Cart Fragments on your homepage and enables the “redirect to cart page” option.
* This optimization improves WooCommerce performance.

Security optimizations

Our plugin is optimized to work best in the A2 Hosting environment, so items marked with an asterisk (*) are only available for sites hosted at A2 Hosting. If you are not an A2 Hosting customer, join today!

Lock editing of plugins and themes from wp-admin
* Prevents misuse of built-in editing capabilities for the WordPress admin.

Change login URL (*)
* Changes the login page URL from the default wp-login.php to a random URL.
* Helps prevent bots from brute-force attacking your login page.

Add CAPTCHA for comments and login (*)
* Adds a CAPTCHA to comment forms and login pages to deter bots from posting spam comments and running brute-force attacks..

Block unauthorized XML-RPC requests
* Rejects XML-RPC requests except for whitelisted services, such as Jetpack.

Deny direct access to configuration files
* Displays a “403 Forbidden” error when visitors or bots try to access WordPress configuration files.

Best practices recommendations

Regenerate wp-config salts
* Generates new values for wp-config.php salts and security keys for increased security.

Recent post limit
*Checks the number of recent posts per page, which should be less than 15 for most sites.

RSS post limit
* Checks the number of posts in RSS feeds, which should be less than 20 for most sites.

Recent posts showing on home page
* Checks whether the home page displays recent posts, and offers to use a static page instead for faster performance.

Permalink structure
* Checks that the permalink structure is configured to fully optimize page caching and get additional SEO benefits.

Unused themes
* Checks if there are any non-default, unused themes that should be deleted.

Inactive plugins
* Checks if there are any inactive plugins that should be deleted.

Hosted with A2 Hosting
* Checks if your site is hosted with A2 Hosting for faster page load times and more optimizations.