by
Fernando Tellado
5 (37 reviews)
DietPress
Page cache, browser cache, defer JS, critical CSS, lazy load and WordPress cleanup. Speed up your site and disable the bloat you do not need.
DietPress ranks #4,514 among WordPress.org plugins with 2,000+ active installations, is #163 of 1,518 in the Performance category, a 5/5 rating from 37 reviews, and was last updated Sep 15, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.
Compatible with WP 7.1
v3.5.6
Current Version v3.5.6
Updated 21 hours ago
Last Update on 15 Sep, 2026
Refreshed 13 hours ago
Last Refreshed on
#163 of 1,518 in Performance
Top 10% by installs
Downloads +9.5% this week
Actively maintained
Rank
#4,514
—
No change
Active Installs
2K+
-31.9%
KW Avg Position
91.6
0.6 worse
Downloads
162.1K
+348 today
Support Resolved
100%
—
No change
Rating
100%
Review 5 out of 5
5
(37 reviews)
Next Milestone 3K
2K+
3K+
283
Ranks to Climb
-
Growth Needed
8,000,000
Active Installs
Pro
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Rank Changes
Current
#4,514
Change
Best
#
Downloads Growth
Downloads
Growth
Peak
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Upgrade NowReviews & Ratings
5.0
37 reviews
Overall
100%
5
36
(97%)
4
1
(3%)
3
0
(0%)
2
0
(0%)
1
0
(0%)
Support Threads Overview
Resolved
Unresolved
1
Total Threads
1
Resolved
0
Unresolved
100%
Resolution Rate
Security History
Source: WPVulnerabilityNo known vulnerabilities on record for DietPress. Checked 1 month ago.
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Start Tracking FreePlugin Details
- Version
- 3.5.6
- Last Updated
- Sep 15, 2026
- Requires WP
- 6.3+
- Tested Up To
- 7.1
- PHP Version
- 7.4 or higher
- Author
- Fernando Tellado
Support & Rating
- Rating
- ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5
- Reviews
- 37
- Support Threads
- 1
- Resolved
- 100%
Keywords
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TL;DR
AI summary of the plugin's readmeThis plugin is for WordPress site owners who want faster load times without manually configuring performance tweaks. It bundles performance optimizations enabled by default with risk-based options to disable unused WordPress features.
- Critical CSS inlining
- JavaScript defer parsing
- Image lazy loading attributes
- Automatic image dimensions
- Resource hints preconnect/DNS prefetch
- Google Fonts local hosting
- Selective WooCommerce/Contact Form 7 loading
- Database maintenance cleanup
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about DietPress
Every time somebody visits your site, WordPress queries the database, runs your plugins, builds the page from your theme and sends it. For a visitor who is not logged in, the result is the same every time until you change something, so doing all of that again is wasted work. A page cache does it once and stores the finished HTML on disk. The next visitor gets that file, skipping the database, the theme and most of the loading time. It is normally the single biggest speed gain a WordPress site can get, and it is also what keeps a small hosting plan standing up when a post does well on social media. You need one unless your hosting already provides it. DietPress detects the usual managed hosts and tells you when that is the case.
On a local WordPress 7.0 install with GeneratePress, WooCommerce and a 76 product catalogue, on PHP 8.5. Each URL was requested twice to warm up and then fifteen times, and the median was taken; the parallel figures are 100 requests with ten in flight at a time. The only thing that changed between the two columns was the page cache switch, on the same content, in the same session. You can repeat it on your own site with any tool that reports time to first byte. From a terminal, curl -o /dev/null -w "%{time_starttransfer}\n" https://yoursite.com/ a dozen times with the cache off, then a dozen with it on, and compare the medians rather than any single reading. Do it while logged out, because your own visits are never cached. Two honest caveats. A local install has no network latency, so the absolute milliseconds are lower than you will see in production, where the saving is usually larger rather than smaller. And these numbers say nothing about a Lighthouse score: that measures mostly what the browser does with your theme and your scripts after the page arrives, which is a different problem from how fast your server answers.
A browser will not paint anything until it has downloaded every stylesheet in the page. Those files are render-blocking: your visitor stares at a blank screen while they arrive. Critical CSS is the small subset of rules needed to draw what fits on the screen at first sight. DietPress writes it straight into the page, so the browser can paint immediately and load the rest of the styles afterwards. It is the usual fix for the "eliminate render-blocking resources" warning in PageSpeed Insights, and it improves Largest Contentful Paint, one of the Core Web Vitals Google measures.
By default a script tag stops the browser: it downloads the file, runs it, and only then carries on reading your page. A theme with half a dozen scripts in the head can hold the first paint for a second or more. Deferring tells the browser to keep building the page and run the scripts once it has finished. Nothing is removed and nothing loads later than it should, it just stops blocking. DietPress handles the dependency order for you and lets you exclude any script that misbehaves, from the settings or with a filter.
Two reasons. Speed: a font from fonts.gstatic.com needs a fresh DNS lookup, TCP connection and TLS handshake to a domain the browser has never contacted, and browser cache partitioning means the visitor gets no benefit from having downloaded that font on another site. Privacy: serving them from Google transfers your visitor's IP address to Google, which German and other European courts have ruled a GDPR violation. DietPress downloads the fonts your theme uses to your own uploads folder and rewrites the stylesheets to point there. If anything fails it quietly falls back to Google, so a font never goes missing.
Plugins tend to load their CSS and JavaScript on every page of your site, whether or not the page uses them. A contact form plugin loads its scripts on every blog post; a slider plugin loads its libraries on pages with no slider; WooCommerce loads its cart on your About page. DietPress detects which pages actually use each one and removes the rest, for WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, the block library, Slider Revolution, TablePress, Smash Balloon, Formidable Forms and Everest Forms. Pages built with a builder such as Elementor keep everything, because their content is not readable from the database and guessing there is how things break.
They cache different things for different people. The page cache stores your HTML on your server, so the next visitor is served it without rebuilding the page. Browser caching tells each visitor's own browser to keep your images, styles, scripts and fonts on their machine, so their second visit downloads almost nothing. You want both, and they do not overlap. DietPress lets you set how long each family of files is kept: media, styles and scripts, and fonts, each on its own, because the right answer is different for each.
It decides how long a visitor's browser may reuse the page itself, as opposed to its images and styles. Zero, "Always revalidate", is not the same as sending nothing at all. With no answer at all the browser invents a lifetime of its own, normally about a tenth of the age of the document, which on an old page can be hours and is entirely out of your hands. With "Always revalidate" the browser asks every time, and the usual answer is a 304 Not Modified of a few hundred bytes, so the page is not downloaded again either: you get almost all of the saving and none of the staleness. Raise it only for a site that genuinely almost never changes, and be aware of the trade: an edit then takes that long to reach anyone who has already visited, because their browser will not even ask. This one is sent as an HTTP header rather than an .htaccess rule, so it works on nginx too.
Risk, not importance. Light is safe on any site: things nobody misses, like the emoji script or the Windows Live Writer tag. Moderate deserves a look first, because a plugin or theme might use it, oEmbed or jQuery Migrate for example. Strict depends on what your site actually does: disabling comments, feeds or a whole content type is only right if you really do not use them. Every option says what it does and what might break, and the Scale tab analyses your site and recommends only what applies to you, so you never have to guess.
They are the three measurements Google uses to judge how a page feels: how quickly the main content appears (LCP), how quickly the page responds to a click (INP) and how much things jump around while loading (CLS). DietPress works on all three. The page cache and preloading cut the time to the first byte and to the largest element; deferring JavaScript and trimming what loads leaves the main thread free to answer clicks; and adding width and height to images that lack them stops the layout from shifting as they arrive.
