Breeze plugin aims to optimize the WordPress site to decrease the page load time and better user experience. It performs caching at multiple levels and compatible with WooCommerce and Multisite too. Breeze support CDN integration and have built-in varnish cache but don’t worry if varnish is not installed on your server, it will leverage the internal caching mechanism. I thought to try breeze to see how it performs, and here is how I tested. Prerequisite: you must have PHP 5.3+ and WordPress 4.5+ versions. It supports PHP 7 too, and if not upgraded already, you should consider for fast loading web page experience.
Performance Testing Details
I am using my test domain (techpostal.com), which is hosted on SiteGround’s Startup plan with no other caching plugin installed. I installed the Genesis child theme Maker Pro with demo content.
Performance Without Plugin
To compare the performance, I performed the load testing with 50 users for 5 minutes from Iowa using BlazeMeter, and the results are:
Average response time – 840.09msAverage throughput – 31.51 hits per second
Now you know how WordPress is performing without installing any plugin. Let’s install the Breeze and see the difference.
Installing Breeze Plugin
Login to WordPress adminGo to Plugins » Add newSearch for breeze and click “Install Now” » Activate
Once installed, let’s go to Settings » Breeze for little configuration.
On Basic options tab, select HTML & CCS for minification
I’ve left JS unchecked as minifying JavaScript may break the site if not handled properly by theme/plugins
Go to Advanced Options and select CSS for group files.
By selecting CSS, I am asking to combine all CSS files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests. If some files are creating an issue, you may want to exclude them here. I would limit to the default + above settings for this test. Let’s do the performance test again to see the difference.
Performance with Breeze Plugin
I performed the load testing again with the same configuration using BlazeMeter, and the result is impressive.
Average response time – 522.13msAverage throughput – 40.36 hits per second
As you can see, just with basic Breeze configuration, a page is loading ~38% faster. I love BlazeMeter; you can do many things. I took a comparison report of response time, as shown below. Based on test results, Breeze looks promising to give a try. Breeze got database optimization as well for the following.
Post revision cleanupAuto draft contentTrashed contentTrackback & PingbackTransient options
So if you decide to use Breeze, then you may regularly perform cleanup right from the database tab without installing an additional plugin. As mentioned earlier, Varnish is enabled default, and if your hosting supports it, a plugin will take care of the rest. You may also be interested in further optimizing WordPress without any plugin. Let me know how Breeze works for you.
