NitroPack Review – Ludicrously Fast Website Optimization

Ever wondered why some sites are faster than others? Maybe it’s the hosting they are using or the CMS they use that is super optimized. In the end, you end up asking yourself:

“What about my competitor’s site. They are using the exact same tech stack or CMS as we are and their site is still faster than mine! What are they doing differently that I’m not?!”

One answer to that question could be that they are optimizing their site. They might be using a cache plugin or maybe they have minified their HTML, CSS, and JS. But how can you do this as well? Well, there is a solution for that, and it’s called NitroPack.

What is NitroPack

NitroPack is an all-in-one performance optimization service. It combines everything you need for a lightning-fast website. Image optimization, code minification, caching, CDN, lazy loading – you name it, NitroPack has it.

Why should I use NitroPack?

The main question “Why should I use NitroPack?” is not an easy question to answer, but it all comes down to a few main points. Let’s go through these points one by one.

1. Fast website increases sales

Website owners and people just starting their website or eCommerce journey might not know this, but it has been studied that website speed directly affects the number of sales and conversions a website has.

When pages load in less than 1 second, the average conversion rate is almost 32%. At a 1-second load time, the conversion rate already drops to 20%. At 2 seconds, the conversion rate begins to level off at 12-13% and reaches its lowest at a 5-second load time. – Portent

This means that if your site is slow, your literally throwing money into the gutter.

2. Fast websites affects user experience

As you might have guessed because the attention span of people is getting shorter and shorter the loading speed of a website will also affect the user experience of the page immensely. The longer your page takes to load the more pain it will cause to the person trying to browse your site. To minimize this “pain” your site should load as fast as possible.

3. Site speed affects your SEO

Something a lot of people don’t actually know is that site speed actually affects your search engine rankings as well. This means if your site takes ages to load you might be ranking lower than your competitor’s site on certain keywords. So if you want to rank to the top, make sure your site is not loading slow even on older devices or lower internet speeds.

When you take all these into consideration using NitroPack is a no-brainer. Losing sales, having a bad user experience, and on top of this losing important keyword rankings to competitors, because of a slow site is a true business killer.

How does NitroPack Work?

How does NitroPack achieve a higher speed for your and our site then? Well, the concept is quite simple, though the tech might not be. To achieve higher speed for our and your site if you decide to try them is in the system they use.

1. NitroPack uses advanced caching mechanism.
   • This means they know what device each user is using allowing them to optimize the page just for that device. This means they will create a cached version of each page on your site for each different device, PC, Tablet and mobile. Allowing them to serve just the right version for the fastest speed.
2. Image optimization
   • If your images aren’t optimized in size and the way they are served NitroPack does this for you. This includes turning them to the latest webp image format, lazy loading them so not all images are loaded instantly (why should they when user can’t even see them all before scrolling) and ofcourse image compression
3. Global CDN
   • Thanks to NitroPack’s global CDN they can offer the cached version of your page closest to the user. This means the user doesn’t have to request your page from US when they live in France, but instead can be served a version of your page somewhere closer to France, or the other way around somewhere closer to their US based location when your actual hosting might be in France, UK or somewhere completely different country.
4. HTML, JS and CSS compression
   • Another great feature for most users who are not code savvy. NitroPack will compress your HTML, JS and CSS to a single file(s) to ensure the browsers can read and process them faster, saving important seconds to milliseconds in time.

How to install and Connect NitroPack to WordPress

Setting NitroPack up with WordPress is very simple. Simply subscribe to a NitroPack package, download the NitroPack’s official plugin from the WordPress plugin library and log in to your NitroPack account from the plugin page.

NitroPack Dashboard

The dashboard is easy to use and read. Thanks to NitroPack’s UX team it’s super simple to grab all the information quickly from the Dashboard.

On the Dashboard, you can quickly see all the active features, current plan your using, page views/month, and even CDN Bandwith/month you have been using.

In settings, you can easily find anything you might need to customize Nitropack to fit your websites / eCommerce store’s needs and to further optimize things like exclusions regarding CSS, Cookies, or other elements on your page.

The same clean look continues on the WordPress admin side when you have set up NitroPack for your WordPress site. Though not as visual as the NitroPacks own site it does give you all the information you might need.

As you can see from the image we are using Nitropack’s “Ludicrous” setting to ensure we get the most out of all the tools and optimizations it has to offer. Something to consider if you decide to use the same setting as us is that it might break some features on your site, so use it with your own discretion.

Case study – No optimization vs Optimized with NitroPack

Now when talking about speed and optimization the one thing that really interests users is “How much can NitroPack speed up my page?” Well, let’s have a look. At first, we are going to compare our front page in Google PageSpeed Insight.

Please note that these numbers can have some variation depending on when and who tests them, but they should stay in the same margin of error around ~5 points.

Something we can instantly see here is that though our page is fairly well optimized already NitroPack helps us to further optimize it and make it super fast. The best part is that you can actually see the difference when loading the page. The biggest difference most people will see will come in mobile speed where we managed to get up to 30-40 points more in PageSpeed Insight.

In GTmetrix the same thing can be seen again. Even though our page is super optimized NitroPack takes it to a whole new level and drops our Largest Contentful Paint from 1.7 seconds to 0.553 seconds. That’s a 67,5% faster loading time!

NitroPack integrations

So who can integrate and use NitroPack you use? Well at the moment NitroPack supports WordPress, WooCommerce, Opencart, and Magento as a CMS. Others integrations might be available through their API, but this is something you need to ask from the support directly. Thankfully their support is extremely helpful and is able to answer almost any question you might have regarding NitroPack.

NitroPack and Cloudflare

If you’re already using Cloudflare to speed up your site, no worries. NitroPack integrates with Cloudflare, allowing you to use both of them to maximize your website speed.

NitroPack pricing

NitroPack offers four different packages, which are all monthly based.

• Free – (0 $/month), 5 000 pageviews per month and 1 GB CDN bandwith.
• Business – (17,50 $/month), 50 000 pageviews per month and 25 GB CDN bandwith.
• Growth – (42,50 $/month), 200 000 pageviews per month and 100 GB CDN bandwith.
• Scale – (146,50 $/month), 1 000 000 pageviews per month and 500 GB CDN bandwith.

Something you should notice is that NitroPack will place a small banner bottom of your page if you choose their Free plan (which is mainly for testing), but won’t add it if you choose any of their paid subscriptions.

Check out NitroPack’s latest pricing here.

Nitropack review conclusion

In conclusion, would we recommend NitroPack to website and eCommerce owners? Absolutely. They have proven to be a reliable service that speeds up and optimizes almost any page to a whole new level. The only thing you might get annoyed with is how quickly you seem to run out of page views when you start noticing more and more traffic heading to your page thanks to better rankings and user experiences.

Use code: SAASBUDDY to grab 5% OFF from your first order.

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