NitroPack Review & Case Study

If you’re not paying attention to site speed, I guarantee you are leaving money on the table.

Slow websites result in-

• Lower search engine rankings
• Higher bounce rates
• Lower conversion rates
• Higher costs per acquistion
• Lower profits

I cannot stress enough how important site speed is if you want to increase your search traffic, but nearly every site I review has failed to address it.

This is especially important with the rollout of Google’s Core Web Vitals update!

But:

All of this is easy to fix yourself without hiring developers.

Just spend 5 minute setting up NitroPack and voila!

My NitroPack case study is going to show you the before and after results, along with how we used it achieve site speed perfection.

What Is NitroPack?

NitroPack is a cloud-based performance optimization tool that helps you optimise your website performance.

Specifically, it will help you get 100/100 Google Pagespeed Scores and fix all of your Core Web Vital issues in a couple of clicks.

It integrates with WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, Opencart and other platforms.

Once you sign up, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up and starts delivering instant results from its CDN platform which includes

…and much more!

Our Results With NitroPack

I decided to put NitroPack to the test on this blog.

We collected a bunch of data from WebPageTest and Google Pagespeed Insights, then we installed NitroPack and ran the same tests again.

This is what we found-

Take a look at this Google Sheet which includes all of the data we logged for our testing.

As you can see the performance gains that NitroPack offers are huge.

And I was very happy to see that many pages are posting 100/100 mobile Google Pagespeed scores using Batchspeed–

In terms of ease of use and results, NitroPack is the best site speed optimization tool I’ve used in the last decade.

So let me break down its best features for you…

What Do I Get For My Money?

I’m going to show you all the different features of NitroPack below, or you can just watch this short video:

Easy Setup & Installation

Setting up NitroPack is really simple.

First, you need to create an account:

1. Go to NitroPack
2. Select your plan (they have a free plan)
3. Enter your details
4. Accept the terms & conditions

And that’s it.

After that, you need to connect your site to NitroPack.

To do so you need to download and install the relevant connector (an SEO plugin for Wordpress). Once NitroPack is installed, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Then all you have to do is:

1. Log into your account
2. Go to Dashboard > Connect Your Website
3. Copy Your Site ID & Site Secret to your connector
4. Click on Connect

And that’s it!

HTML Optimization

It’s very easy for your HTML code to become unnecessary bloated and not necessarily optimized in the right way.

NitroPack has a number of feautres that will automatically make your code faster and lighter such as HTML minification:

Along with HTML compression to deliver & load your site quickly to your visitors no matter how bad their connection is.

Plus, it automatically optimizes any necessary “DNS pre connects” to help reduce load time and speed up connections to required sources.

CSS Optimization

Like HTML, it’s easy for CSS files to become bloated which lots of styles that aren’t used on the current page you are viewing.

NitroPack have built a number of features specific to optimizing CSS-

All of this is done alongside the deferred loading of Google Fonts which means your site and content gets loaded rapidly.

To put it simply NitroPack will reduce load time and reduce first content paint times with its unique approach to CSS optimization.

JavaScript Optimization

JavaScript is public enemy number 1 for optimizing your site speed.

These include things like JQuery or tracking scripts like Google Analytics or Facebook pixels alongside any Javascript functionality baked into your site.

This is why NitroPack have built a number of Javascript optimization specific features that allow your site to load faster without any loss of function-

What I love about NitroPacks approach is that it just works out of the box with a number of popular scripts.

This isn’t usually the case with optimization plugins and I’ve been very impressed with NitroPack’s ability to overcome Javascript problems.

Image Optimization

Images also provide a huge amount of opportunity to add unnecessary bloat to a page.

Usually by having unoptimized images in the first place or by serving images that are larger than they need to be for the device that is viewing your site leading to:

NitroPack takes care of image optimization automatically by:

This means that no matter the device or browser, you will always be loading the most optimized version of the image automatically.

Robust Content Delivery Network

NitroPack includes a robust CDN which means all of your HTML, CSS, Javascript and images will all be served locally to your visitor.

So if your visitor comes from Germany, everything loads from a German data center. If they come from the UK, everything loads from a UK data center and so forth.

The NitroPack CDN also includes some additional features:

Advanced Caching System

All of this is built on top of NitroPacks advanced caching system which includes a number of features to make caching more intelligent-

Smart Invalidation
This ensures that optimised content is always served to your visitors while your new content is being updated in the background.

Cookie & Device Awareness
A lot of sites use cookies to deliver optimised and personalised content based on your customer’s data like:

NitroPack is able to recognize this and generate optimized pages for each device and visitor as needed on the fly.

For example your site might look different on a desktop computer, a tablet and a mobile phone – NitroPack will create unique caches for each of those devices to make sure it’s always delivering the most optimized experience possible.

3rd-party Cache Integration
NitroPack is compatible with 3rd party caching software such as:

And much more!

Automatic Cache Warmup
The cache warmup feature means that all of your pages will always be optimized no matter what.

Whether you published them 6 years ago or you made a content update 30 seconds ago, the automatic cache warmup has you covered-

Make sure you set it up with your homepage and sitemap URL’s.

NitroPack Pricing

So now that you know what you get, for your money – you are probably wondering how much it actually costs.

NitroPack offers a FREE plan for you to try it out without any commitment.

Over and above that there are four different plans that are all priced depending on how big your site is:

For more details about the prices, I suggest you check the NitroPack pricing page.

NitroPack vs WP Rocket

NitroPack and WP Rocket offer a very similar feature set, but NitroPack is the clear winner in terms of the features offered and the performance it delivers.

In our own test results, the “before” scores were done with WPRocket installed. Then we removed WP Rocket and replaced it with NitroPack for the “after” scores-

As you can see there is a clear winner in terms of pure performance.

There is also a clear winner when we look at things from a features perspective:

✔ – Enabled      ☑ – Partially      X – Not Available

NitroPack is the winner, without a doubt! It offers features and performance that WPRocket can only dream of.

But that does come at a cost and NitroPack is quite a lot more expensive than WPRocket especially if you’re running multiple sites.

So if you are just starting out, you might want to consider using WP Rocket until you have established traffic and content. WP Rocket is still one of the most powerful caching plugins out there and will do just fine for any WordPress sites.

I used it for many years and never had any trouble, you can learn more in my full WP Rocket review.

Why Is Site Speed Critical?

It is essential you understand how your website speed can impact your ability to generate revenue.

You have only 5 seconds to engage your website visitors, and each second is crucial.

To make things worse:

Every second delay will:

So let’s delve a little deeper so you can understand precisely how that happens.

Google Ranking Factor

You probably already know it:

All things equal – the faster your website is, the better you will rank.

However, it’s about to become even more significant since Google has announced the page experience signals algorithm update.

The new page experience signals will combine Core Web Vitals (loading, interactivity, visual stability) with the existing search signals, including:

… and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

So if you weren’t taking site speed seriously before, you absolutely must do now.

If you jump into Google Search Console you can look at the Core Web Vitals report to see how you’re doing-

If you see a lot of Poor URLS, you are leaving a lot of search traffic on the table!

Human Ranking Factor

As I said before, people don’t like slow-loading websites.

Amazon reported that a one second delay in load time costs them $1.6 billion in sales per year.

Site speed is a ranking factor for customers, just like it’s a ranking factor for Google.

Luckily for you:

All of these problems can be solved in 5 minutes with NitroPack.

Wrapping It Up

As you can see from our results:

NitroPack took an already well optimised site (WPRocket + ShortPixel + KeyCDN + Cloudflare) and took it to the next level!

I mean…

…who doesn’t want to see 100/100 mobile Pagespeed Scores like this:

And let’s not forget:

All of that backs into posting a perfect Core Web Vitals report with Google-

These are the reasons why I use NitroPack across my portfolio of sites.

Try NitroPack for free today!

Frequently Asked Questions

Is NitroPack any good?
Yes. NitroPack is an amazing cloud-based performance optimization tool for speeding up your website. According to my tests (see results in the case study above), NitroPack is the easiest way to fix your speed issue and boost your performance.

Does NitroPack cheat?
No, NitroPack doesn’t cheat. NitroPack simply uses a different approach (than traditional optimization tools) to speed up websites and get amazing results. If you don’t believe me, try the plugin yourself and test your speed with speed tools such as GTMetrix or Google Page Speed to see what happens.

How quickly does NitroPack work?
It can take to NitroPack between a few seconds to a few minutes to optimise a single page of your site, depending on the size and length of your content.

How much does NitroPack cost?
NitroPack offers a free version perfect for testing. Once you’ve tested the tool and are ready to invest, you can choose between 3 pricing plans. The first plan costs $21 per month, the second plan costs $51 per month and the third one costs $176 per month. Note that if you pay annually, you’ll get a discount.

Is NitroPack better than WP Rocket?
NitroPack and WP Rocket offer a very similar feature set, but NitroPack is the clear winner in terms of the performance it delivers. So, if you’re looking to boost your speed scores and improve your overall performance then NitroPack is the option you should consider.