ApexPress Performance

A modular, security-conscious WordPress performance optimization suite built for fast page delivery, safer frontend optimization, modern image formats, WooCommerce-aware caching, real-user monitoring, database diagnostics, CDN integration, REST automation, and WP-CLI workflows.

Overview

ApexPress Performance is a WordPress performance plugin designed around a simple principle:

Optimize aggressively only where it is safe, measurable, and reversible.

Instead of treating every WordPress site as identical, ApexPress separates caching, frontend optimization, media processing, WordPress cleanup, WooCommerce safeguards, delivery/CDN controls, monitoring, database diagnostics, and developer tooling into independent modules.

The plugin works locally without requiring an ApexPress cloud service. Features that genuinely require Chromium workers, an edge network, long-running services, or fleet-wide state are intentionally separated from the standalone plugin rather than being represented by non-functional switches.

Key Goals

• Fast by default — anonymous page caching, cache warming, HTML optimization, modern image formats, resource hints, and browser-cache controls.
• Safe by default — personalized, authenticated, WooCommerce session, API, preview, search, and sensitive requests are excluded from page caching.
• Production-oriented — bounded queues, atomic writes, targeted invalidation, encrypted backups, conservative JavaScript behavior, and reversible destructive operations.
• WooCommerce-aware — Cart, Checkout, My Account, sessions, add-to-cart flows, Store API traffic, and related dynamic contexts are protected automatically.
• Privacy-conscious — RUM stores aggregated performance metrics without persisting IP addresses, query strings, cookies, referrers, or form values.
• Developer-friendly — REST endpoints, WP-CLI commands, modular service classes, structured diagnostics, and documented architecture.
• Extensible — designed to support future browser workers, edge caching providers, visual regression testing, agency tooling, and advanced performance intelligence.

Feature Highlights

1. Page Cache & Delivery

• Anonymous filesystem page cache.
• SHA-256 cache keys.
• Atomic cache writes.
• Configurable TTL.
• Optional mobile cache variants.
• Query-string caching disabled by default.
• Sensitive query protection when query caching is enabled.
• Path-based cache exclusions.
• Cookie/session-aware bypass rules.
• WooCommerce-aware bypass logic.
• Set-Cookie, private, and no-store response protection.
• Stale cached HTML fallback for bounded origin 5xx failures.
• Targeted invalidation for posts, archives, and taxonomies.
• Cache warming after content invalidation.
• Bounded WP-Cron cache warming queue.
• Browser cache headers.
• Generic CDN URL rewriting for local static assets.
• WordPress Core Speculation Rules integration.
• Preconnect, DNS-prefetch, and preload controls.
• Cloudflare targeted URL purge integration.
• Explicit Cloudflare full-cache purge support.
• Apache browser-cache/compression rule management.
• Generated NGINX configuration guidance.

2. Optional Early Page Cache

ApexPress includes an optional advanced-cache.php drop-in for serving eligible cached pages before the normal WordPress bootstrap completes.

Safety behavior includes:

• Foreign advanced-cache.php files are never overwritten silently.
• Canonical-host validation prevents arbitrary Host-header cache namespaces.
• HEAD requests return headers without replaying the HTML body.
• Authenticated, personalized, query-sensitive, and WooCommerce session traffic is bypassed.
• The drop-in is removed on uninstall only when ApexPress can verify ownership.

For the early cache path, WordPress must have:

define( 'WP_CACHE', true );

in wp-config.php.

3. HTML, CSS & JavaScript Optimization

HTML

• Comment removal where safe.
• Whitespace minification.
• Protected handling for:
  • `