Script & style manager
An admin-bar panel on the live page lists every script and style actually loading on that exact URL — disable them per page, per post type, or everywhere. Real per-URL detection, not a guess.
Oiko / plugins / boost
Performance
Oiko Boost
Not a cache — the layer around it. Twelve focused modules that strip weight, delay what doesn't matter and load what does, guided by how real visitors actually use your pages.
free forever · no pro tier · no ads · nothing phones home
Price£0 — full feature set
Modules12, each toggleable
Cachingnone — pairs with yours
Preload logicreal-visitor data
Settings UItabbed, one menu
Runs beside your cacheWP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, FlyingPress keep their job — Boost does everything else.
Data, not heuristicsWith Optimization Detective active, preloads and fetchpriority follow real visitor viewports.
Kind to slow connectionsSave-Data and slow-network visitors skip non-critical assets entirely.
Nothing you didn't ask forNo ads, no upsell nags, no telemetry — the Oiko house policy, as always.
What it does
The whole toolkit, one plugin.
The feature breadth the reference product charges $24.95 a year for — free, coherent, and each module individually switchable.
Lazy load & delayed JS
CSS background-images, iframes and video lazy-loaded (core only handles <img>), plus non-critical JavaScript deferred — or delayed entirely until the first interaction.
Save-Data aware
Reads the browser's Save-Data header and connection type — visitors on data-saver or slow connections skip non-critical assets outright, rather than merely loading them late.
Core bloat, off
Emojis, embeds, XML-RPC, front-end dashicons, RSD and wlwmanifest links, jQuery Migrate, and the Heartbeat API throttled. Quiet wins, all in one place.
Local fonts & network hints
Google Fonts downloaded and self-hosted — one less third-party request, and the GDPR consent question goes with it. DNS prefetch and preconnect for the domains that remain.
Database cleanup
Revisions, trash, spam and expired transients cleared on a schedule, with table optimisation. The housekeeping module every performance stack ends up needing.
Speculative loading & transitions
Browser speculation-rules with per-post-type eagerness and exclusion lists, plus view-transition presets — the same browser APIs as the official plugins, with the settings UI they never got.
Real-visitor diagnostics
A BFCache audit that flags (and safely fixes) what's blocking instant back/forward navigation, and a Chrome UX Report dashboard in wp-admin — field data from real visits, not lab scores.
Why it exists
Every piece is free somewhere. Nobody ships the whole.
The reference product in this space charges $24.95 a year with no free tier. Each of its features exists free somewhere — scattered across a dozen plugins with clashing UIs and overlapping responsibilities. Boost bundles the whole breadth as one coherent, free plugin.
And it goes one step further: with WordPress's Optimization Detective active, lazy-load, preload and fetchpriority decisions are driven by where real visitors' viewports actually land on your pages — per breakpoint. Every incumbent guesses. Boost measures.
- 01Not a cache — page/object caching and CDNs stay with the incumbents that do them well.
- 02Not a minifier — combining and aggregating CSS/JS is already free and done well elsewhere.
- 03No web-worker script offloading — the risk of silently breaking your analytics isn't worth it.
- 04CrUX pulls public aggregate data about your site from Google's API — read-only, never telemetry out.
Built the Oiko way
oiko-plugin-boilerplatePHP 8.3+ · WP 6.7+PHPUnit + WP_Mockdeferred, per-page assets onlyOptimization Detective soft-depno phone-home, ever
Questions
Fair ones.
Is it a caching plugin?+
No — deliberately. WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache and FlyingPress already do caching well. Boost handles everything around the cache: what loads, when, and for whom. Run them together; that's the design.
Do I need Optimization Detective installed?+
No. It's a soft dependency — without it, Boost falls back to well-tuned static heuristics and is fully useful. Install it and the preload, lazy-load and fetchpriority modules get smarter automatically, using real per-breakpoint visitor data.
Does it phone home?+
No. Boost sends nothing anywhere. The CrUX dashboard reads public, aggregate Chrome UX Report data about your site from Google's free API — data Google already publishes — and displays it in wp-admin. Nothing flows the other way.
Also free