Good Name, Strange Launch Messaging

I received an email today announcing a free new plugin called Solid Performance. My initial reaction was that it’s a cool name with a product that can have a lot of potential. Website performance and Core Web Vitals are on the forefront of people’s minds these days. However, I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that the plugin only focuses on Page Caching.

When I see a plugin with Performance in the name, I expect a myriad of tools, options, and methods to improve the performance of my site. After all, a website is made up of many pieces and a lot of folks want to fine-tune them if possible. Thankfully, it looks like Page Caching is just the first in many features slated for the plugin. Why they decided to bury that information deep in the announcement post is beyond me.

While our initial release centers on page caching, Solid Performance is built with future growth in mind. We aim to expand its capabilities to cover a broader range of performance-enhancing features, ensuring your site remains at peak efficiency.

You can see how it works via screenshots on the plugin’s page. I was a bit curious to see what would happen if I enabled it on my site. I use Query Monitor to measure the speed of pages and overall site performance. For some reason, when Solid Performance is enabled, the monitoring functionality of Query Monitor disappears. This means I can’t use it to measure if Solid Performance provides a site speed boost. When Solid Performance is disabled, Query Monitor works normally.

If you launch a new product in the WordPress space, the marketing has to be on point. Preferably, most questions are answered by an FAQ section or from the information available on a landing page. In the case of Solid Performance, its landing page has the following section which has me scratching my head.

What does this information mean to most people? I understand what the numbers mean after staring at them for awhile, but I don’t know how these numbers were reached, where the data comes from, etc. Was a subsection of SolidWP customers polled to get their reactions to this section? These numbers could have been pulled from thin air for I know. For benchmark numbers like these, it would be nice to know or see the sources of the data.

WordPress users are spoiled for choice when it comes to performance plugins. Solid Performance is a great name but it’s going to need a lot more under the hood before it becomes a top of mind choice for many folks. By the way, I recommend obtaining the plugin through the WordPress.org Plugin Directory as getting it from the SolidWP website requires you to give them your email address.