GT Performance

Changelog

The complete release history is on the GT Performance changelog, and planned work is on the roadmap.

1.2.1

• Optimize-only mode: pages marked “Don’t cache this page”, and pages a plugin marks with DONOTCACHEPAGE, are now sent no-store. Before, they skipped optimization but sent no cache headers, so a host cache such as LiteSpeed, Hostinger, or Kinsta could store them.
• Unused CSS status no longer says “Needs cache setup” in optimize-only mode, where CSS builds run without the drop-in.
• wp gt-performance cache explain and cache verify accept every hostname --page-url accepts, including ones added with the gt_performance_canonical_hosts filter. Explain this page in Tools accepts them too.
• Language and currency plugin advice on Integrations names the “Cookie prefixes that bypass cache” field, and the database --all-revisions help names the “Run selected optimization” button.

1.2.0

• New: Setup tab. Six steps check this server, detect other page caches and your host’s cache, choose the cache mode, connect Cloudflare, list store and language plugins, and verify a real cached page, with Cloudflare’s answer shown beside it. The Dashboard points to it until verification passes.
• New: optimize-only mode for hosts that already cache pages. Eligible pages are optimized as WordPress sends them and your host stores the result; nothing is stored twice. Your host sets cache headers for those pages; pages GT Performance would not cache, such as carts, checkouts, and searches, are still sent as no-store.
• New: “Don’t cache this page” and “Use original CSS” in the editor’s GT Performance box. Explain this page reports the first as page-option.
• New: “Cache each value separately” query parameters. Pages like ?orderby=price or ?lang=de get their own cached copy (values up to 100 characters, up to 100 copies per page) instead of bypassing the cache, and purging the page clears every copy at the origin and at Cloudflare.
• Saving settings purges the page cache and Cloudflare only when the change affects cached pages. Credentials, connection status, cleanup schedules, and preload limits no longer purge.
• Deactivation deletes this site’s managed Cloudflare rule, and only that rule, then purges this site’s pages from Cloudflare. wp gt-performance cloudflare disconnect [--forget] and a Disconnect button do the same and turn the integration off.
• Sites sharing a Cloudflare zone, such as example.com and shop.example.com on separate installs, each keep their own cache rule, and a full purge clears only the site’s own hostnames instead of the whole zone.
• The Cloudflare connection check warns about DNS-only (grey cloud) records and about APO caching HTML alongside the managed rule.
• WPML, Polylang, TranslatePress, Weglot, and common WooCommerce currency switchers are detected, flagged on Integrations with what to set, and reported in the health report.
• Query parameters sent as arrays, such as ?s[]=x, now bypass the cache. They were read as the page with no query and could be stored under its key.
• The health report and cron checks are translatable, and a translation template ships in languages/.

1.1.1

• Safe mode (GTPERF_SAFE_MODE) now also stops the page-cache drop-in from serving stored pages, so nothing is served from the cache while it is on.
• Cached pages keep the security and indexing headers WordPress and other plugins send: Content-Security-Policy, Strict-Transport-Security, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy, cross-origin policies, X-Robots-Tag, Content-Language, and Link.
• Preload requests carry a short-lived signed token, so visitors can no longer force stale pages to rebuild.
• Cloudflare and xCloud now purge when the purge starts from a signed-out request, such as a visitor’s approved comment or a checkout that changes stock.
• WordPress core, plugin, and theme updates purge the page cache, so cached pages no longer point at replaced asset versions.
• Lightweight YouTube previews no longer leave an empty band above the video in the YouTube embed block, show YouTube’s red play button, and play from a click anywhere on the thumbnail.
• New: Tools → Explain this page shows why a URL is or is not cached, what the origin holds, and whether Cloudflare agrees. The admin bar links straight to it, with a link to view the page with every optimization off.
• wp gt-performance database run keeps your “Scheduled revisions to retain”. Add --all-revisions to delete every revision, as the Run cleanup button does.
• wp gt-performance doctor and health exit with status 1 when a check fails. Warnings still exit 0.
• --page-url must be on this site for cache purge, explain, and verify, and for cloudflare purge.
• The autosave interval setting now takes effect.
• Settings export, read-only abilities, and proposals include “Disable password strength meter”.
• X-GT-Cache-Reason keeps paths such as path:/cart/.
• Corrected the Diagnostic logging and Purge GT cache descriptions, and removed unused code.

1.1.0

• Cache warming resumes across background batches instead of stopping after 20 child sitemaps, reads chosen sitemaps or the WordPress sitemap plus robots.txt, warms recent pages first, respects the cache size budget, and records whether each page was actually stored.
• Purges now also clear pages that showed an updated post: listings it joins or leaves (including its old category and later pages), query loops, widgets, pages with an edited reusable block or menu, and shop listings after price or stock changes. Renamed terms clear their old archive URL.
• New purge preview: wp gt-performance cache preview --post=<id>.
• Related-page purges no longer include URLs on another site.
• Settings history with restore, plus JSON export and import. Credentials are never stored or restored, and simultaneous saves can no longer overwrite each other.
• New health report in Tools, Site Health, and wp gt-performance health, with a redacted support export.
• Background queue: jobs are claimed exclusively, crashed jobs stop after three attempts, and jobs can be paused, retried, and cancelled from Tools and WP-CLI. Waiting work can no longer be starved indefinitely.
• WordPress Studio and Playground (SQLite) are supported.
• New: Fetch important CSS classes. After you change unused CSS settings, sample pages of each public post type are checked in your browser, and builds keep the styles that JavaScript-added parts (tables of contents, ads, sliders) need.
• Fixed: Bricks 2 pages lost their base styles when Bricks’ own stylesheets were optimized, icon-font rules written as :before were never pruned, pages with a comment form (including Akismet’s) were never served their unused CSS, generated CSS could override a theme’s excluded stylesheets, and CSS builds failed on hosts whose optimizer caches the build request.
• Optional AI assistant access (WordPress 6.9+, off by default): read cache and health evidence, and with separate permission purge or preload up to 20 URLs, regenerate CSS, retry jobs, and propose settings for an administrator to approve. Works through the REST API or the WordPress MCP Adapter.
• Optional AI adviser (WordPress 7.0+, off by default) that explains diagnostics using the AI provider configured in WordPress, showing exactly what will be sent first.
• Manual database cleanup runs in the background with live progress and a stop button, so the admin screen no longer waits for it. Emptying the trash or deleting spam no longer purges pages.
• CSS Status explains each result in plain language and suggests a Hybrid inline limit from the sizes it measured.
• New AI & MCP, Object Cache, Database, and CSS Status tabs in settings. The Cache tab is renamed Page Cache. Admin tables and summary cards now sit cleanly inside their panels.
• JavaScript defer now respects WordPress script dependencies and inline code, fixing inline jQuery code breaking when defer was on. Unregistered scripts are no longer deferred. Per-page script and hero options in the editor.
• Unused CSS now keeps page builder state styles (menus, tabs, sticky headers, popups, sliders, animations) for Elementor, Bricks, Divi, Beaver Builder, Oxygen, Breakdance, WPBakery, Brizy, Kadence Blocks, Spectra, GenerateBlocks, and SiteOrigin, and leaves GT Page Blocks Builder and Thrive Architect styles untouched.
• Hero image rules with optional responsive preload, and speculative loading kept away from cart, checkout, and account pages.
• REST API post updates without a login cookie now purge the edge cache too.
• Fixed admin tooltips widening pages on phones and PHP warnings when the cache directory is not writable.

1.0.14

• Fixed individual Cloudflare purges by allowing internal PURGE requests in the managed cache rule while preserving checkout, session, and query exclusions.
• Wait for Cloudflare before verifying or reporting manual cache purges; show partial failures and retain the latest purge result even with debug logging disabled.
• Purge desktop, mobile, and tablet cache variants when separate device caching is enabled.
• Retry temporary Cloudflare transport, rate-limit, and server failures up to three times, preserving unprocessed batches and honoring Retry-After.
• A successful full purge supersedes queued URL purges and retries. Failed verification requests no longer appear successful, and receipt details display correctly.
• After upgrading, use Connect/sync Cloudflare once to update the existing managed rule. Unrelated Cloudflare rules are preserved.

1.0.13

• Protects configuration and drop-ins against incomplete writes and unsafe temporary files.
• Stores private diagnostics in the database and removes old log files.
• Keeps Redis markers in the plugin cache and prevents unsafe symlink traversal during uninstall.
• Reports failed runtime settings saves and retains previous settings instead of falsely reporting success.
• Replaced PHP-containing runtime configuration files with authenticated encrypted JSON and migrated both cache drop-ins.
• Removed legacy configuration files after successful migration.

1.0.12

• Protected temporary configuration files with the same PHP guard and access-rule suffix as published configurations, restricted permissions before writing, and rejected incomplete writes.
• Escaped less-than characters as CSS escapes before adding generated inline styles, preventing HTML closing-tag injection while preserving CSS string values.
• Returned completed page responses through an output-buffer callback, preserving scripts, forms, and SVG while keeping escaping at each transformation boundary.
• Removed obsolete feature descriptions and interface remnants so the readme matches the current plugin.

1.0.11

• Changed generated CSS and frontend loaders to use WordPress asset registration, enqueue, and printing functions.
• Bundled the interaction-delay and YouTube loaders as static plugin assets.
• Fixed nested output-buffer handling so WordPress asset printers can run during final HTML optimization.
• Restricted early cache reads to validated local files and rejected paths outside the page-cache directory.
• Kept opt-in JavaScript minification with WordPress transient storage and signed external delivery instead of JavaScript file writes. Defer, delay, saved settings, and exclusions remain supported.
• Added original-script fallback for expired minification results, versioned URLs, browser caching, and ETag revalidation.
• Hardened both early drop-in configuration readers and restricted saved font files to recognized binary font types with atomic publication.

1.0.10

• Added unused CSS status counts, size savings, build timings, failure details, and manual report refresh on the Optimization tab.
• Added per-URL, per-result, and full CSS regeneration using bounded background jobs. Active jobs are not duplicated by repeated manual actions.
• Fixed page-cache and commerce rules blocking authenticated CSS generator requests. Other request protections remain intact, and build responses are never cached.
• Fixed generator tokens leaking into report URLs and reuse keys. HTTP errors and missing build reports now trigger queue retries instead of false success.
• Fixed CSS reuse across differing IDs, attributes, and DOM relationships. Forced regeneration invalidates reusable results and purges affected page caches.
• Statistics now cover all stored reports and exclude stale results and missing files from current savings.
• Aligned panel padding, report spacing, and regeneration controls, and clarified settings help text.

1.0.8

• Adds Safe Mode. Define GTPERF_SAFE_MODE in wp-config.php and every HTML transformation stops and no page is served from or written to the cache, without changing a single setting or touching the drop-in. It is the answer to “something looks wrong and I cannot tell which option did it”.
• Adds automatic cleanup. Cached pages past their lifetime, entries left unreachable by a settings change, generated CSS and JavaScript nothing has requested in two weeks, and the diagnostic log are now reclaimed hourly, and the cache is capped at a configurable number of entries. Nothing removed cached files before, so one settings save could leave hundreds of megabytes on disk permanently.
• Adds a “Remove all data when the plugin is deleted” option. The uninstall routine has always been gated on a setting that nothing wrote, so deleting the plugin left its options, database tables, drop-ins, and the Redis credentials file behind whatever you chose.
• Unused CSS removal works again and is a normal setting on the Optimization tab, off by default. It no longer corrupts inline SVG or non-Latin text, keeps escaped utility class names such as the ones Tailwind generates, passes stylesheets it cannot safely analyze through untouched instead of mangling them, and leaves rel="alternate stylesheet" alone. Generation now happens in the background rather than in a visitor’s page load, and the result is reused across pages that share a template. Measured on a real page: 320 KB down to 101 KB.
• Removed experimental features and their unused endpoints.
• Product pages now clear when stock or price changes through the shop’s own tools rather than only when the post is saved.
• Fixed the managed Cloudflare Cache Rule telling the edge to cache responses this plugin marks private. The edge cache lifetime now defaults to respecting your origin’s Cache-Control header. If you set a positive lifetime, the rule is narrowed to requests with no query string, because overriding the origin cannot be made safe for query strings the origin refuses to cache.
• Removed the WordPress revision limit control. It filtered wp_revisions_to_keep on every site that activated the plugin, whether or not the database module was enabled, so posts lost revision history that could not be recovered.
• Trashing, unpublishing, or renaming a post now clears its cached page. Previously a withdrawn page kept being served from the cache for the rest of its stale window, and a renamed post kept serving its old URL ahead of the redirect WordPress would issue.
• Saving settings now clears the page cache. Every save invalidates every stored entry, and nothing removed the unreachable files, so the cache directory grew without limit.
• The cache capture pipeline no longer runs when the page-cache drop-in is not installed, which is the state directly after activation. It was doing the full render, optimization, and two file writes for a cache nothing could read.
• Removed the X-GT-Performance-Bypass request header. It was never signed despite its internal name, so any client could force a full uncached render on every request.
• A full cache purge no longer deletes the .htaccess and index.html files that keep the cache directory unreadable from the web.
• GT Performance no longer activates on WordPress multisite. Its compiled configuration and cache directory are shared across a network, so one site’s settings decided another site’s cache behavior.
• Added a LICENSE file, disclosed the three bundled MIT libraries, and corrected documentation that described WordPress.org as the update authority. The plugin is not listed in the directory yet.

1.0.7

• The release package no longer ships the extensionless command line wrappers bundled with the minifier library. WordPress.org does not permit them, and the minifier itself is unaffected.

1.0.6

• Adds separate controls for the main feed and the secondary feeds. The main feed at /feed/ can stay live and indexable while comment, category, tag, taxonomy, author, date, search, and post type feeds return a 404, and the main feed’s discovery link can stay in the head while the rest are removed.
• The gauravtiwari.org WordPress preset now keeps the main feed discoverable instead of removing every feed link.

1.0.5

• Uninstalling with “remove all data” enabled now also removes the cache directory. Cached pages, generated CSS and JavaScript, logs, and both configuration files were left on disk, and the Redis configuration file holds a host, username, and password.

1.0.4

• Removed the upgrade compatibility code carried since 1.0.1. The plugin no longer deletes configuration files written by earlier releases, no longer drops their database tables, and no longer loads a class on behalf of a cache drop-in published before 1.0.1.
• Upgrading from 1.0.0 or earlier requires replacing the cache drop-in first. A standalone repair script is available: https://gist.github.com/wpgaurav/03d61d313df00b4127db92393ed74681

1.0.2

• Fixes every button and background request in the GT Performance admin screens returning a blank page on 1.0.1. The 1.0.1 prefix rename renamed what the controls submit but not the handlers registered to receive it, so nothing was listening. Purge, Cloudflare connect and sync, Redis test and install, drop-in install, xCloud refresh, database cleanup, CSS regeneration, and admin-bar actions were affected.

1.0.1

• Fixed a fatal error that took the front end and wp-admin down when updating from 1.0.0.
• Fixed the plugin’s database tables not being recreated after the internal prefix rename, which broke cache preloading and CSS generation on upgraded sites.
• Fixed installing the page-cache drop-in twice removing it instead of leaving it in place.
• A site moved to a new path now republishes its drop-in automatically instead of silently serving uncached.
• Configuration and page-cache metadata are now inert JSON data files. Nothing generates or executes PHP at runtime.
• advanced-cache.php now ships as a bundled file that is copied into place instead of being generated, and resolves its own paths, so a renamed or relocated plugin directory keeps working.
• The early cache drop-in and WordPress now sanitize every request value through one shared implementation, so cache keys and bypass decisions can no longer diverge between them.
• Fixed keyboard focus styles being pruned from generated CSS. :focus-visible and :focus-within rules were dropped as unused.
• Every output buffer this plugin opens is now closed explicitly on shutdown.
• Renamed the GTP_ and gtp_ prefixes to GTPERF_ and gtperf_. Constants set in wp-config.php and stored transients all use the new prefix and the old names are no longer read.
• Updated the bundled CSS parser to 9.4.0. The new version pulls in a required library that makes the plugin about 2.4 MB larger; pages served from the cache are unaffected.

1.0.0

• First stable release, distributed as free GPL software.
• Atomic origin page caching with an owned advanced-cache.php drop-in, background stale rebuilds, sitemap-driven warming, and verified purge receipts.
• Server-side unused-CSS optimization with file, inline, and hybrid delivery, staged rollout, and per-URL regeneration.
• Cloudflare Free cache-rule compiler, exact-URL purging, connection diagnostics, and scoped-token provisioning.
• Optional origin-pull static-asset CDN rewriting with exact extension controls.
• FluentCart, Easy Digital Downloads, and WooCommerce cache-safety adapters.
• JavaScript, media, font, embed, database, bloat, and Redis object-cache modules with encrypted credentials.
• xCloud host integration with explicit edge ownership, Perfmatters ownership coordination, and automatic analytics-plugin protection.
• Explain This Page diagnostics, admin-bar actions, and WP-CLI commands.