FastPixel vs NitroPack: Best Cloud Optimizer for WordPress

FastPixel and NitroPack are two WordPress solutions packed with unique and overlapping features designed to supercharge a website’s speed.

Alright, buckle up as we dive headfirst into comparing these two contenders, so you can nail down the perfect fit for your website’s requirements.

Understanding the plugins

FastPixel

FastPixel is a cloud-based website accelerator for WordPress, offering powerful tools like cache warm-up, critical CSS generation, and code minification to boost page performance.

It features ShortPixel’s advanced image compression, adaptive resizing, and WebP delivery, ensuring faster load timesy. With a built-in global CDN, Core Web Vitals improvements, and HTTP/2 support, FastPixel delivers great optimization through an intuitive interface backed by 24/7 support.

NitroPack

Similarly, NitroPack stands out as a cloud-based solution for website optimization. It is engineered to be foolproof – streamlining the optimization process with its ease of use, and delivering good scores on PageSpeed.

Opinions vary on its optimization strategies, some arguing it implements overly aggressive optimizations. Nonetheless, NitroPack undeniably accelerates page loading times, serving as a premium remedy for poor hosting choices.

Feature comparison

Image optimization

FastPixel primarily focuses on image optimization with cloud-based compression, WebP, and serving adaptive images.

NitroPack, on the other hand, provides similar cloud-based image optimization services. However, the option to deliver adaptive images is only available for higher-tier plans.

Both plugins play a crucial role in amping up your website’s performance, no doubt about it. Yet, where FastPixel shines is its laser focus on advanced image optimization. What’s more, FastPixel doesn’t force you to juggle between different plans to unlock all its features. That’s what gives FastPixel the upper hand in this area.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
Image compression	Yes	Yes
Local/cloud compression	Cloud	Cloud
Adaptive images	Yes	Only for higher-tier plans
WebP delivery	Yes	Yes
Lazy loading	Yes	Yes
Lazy loading iframes	Yes	Yes
Add missing height and width attributes	Yes	No
LQIPs	No	No

Caching

Both FastPixel and NitroPack incorporate essential caching features such as page cache and preloading to optimize website performance.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
Page cache	Yes	Yes
Preloading cache	Yes	Yes
HTTP caching	Yes (for the resources on the CDN)	Yes

CSS & JS optimization

Both FastPixel and NitroPack offer a robust suite of CSS & JS optimization features. They both offer offloading CSS minification onto the CDN, generating CCSS, asynchronously loading CSS, handling unused CSS, offloading JS minification onto the CDN, deferring JS loading, and delaying JS execution. Suffice it to say, both plugins are great in this critical area of website optimization.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
Local minify CSS	No	No
Offload CSS minification (on CDN)	Yes	Yes
Critical CSS generation	Yes	Yes
Load CSS asynchronously	Yes	Yes
Deal with unused CSS	Yes	Yes
Local minify JS	No	No
Offload JS minification (on CDN)	Yes	Yes
Deferred loading JS	Yes	Yes
Delay JS execution	Yes	Yes

Fonts & database optimization

FastPixel stands out with a unique feature: it smartly identifies characters and symbols actively utilized on a web page and integrates them into a custom font. This clever approach ensures that websites load only the essential font glyphs, thereby optimizing performance by slashing the overall font file size and enhancing page load speeds.

However, same as NitroPack, it lacks database optimization capabilities. Notably, only FastPixel supports font preloading, giving it an edge in this aspect.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
Pre-load fonts	Yes	No
Delete unnecessary database entries	No	No
Schedule database maintenance	No	No
Optimize database tables	No	No

CDN integration

FastPixel integrates with a CDN service (via bunny.net) to streamline the delivery of HTML, images, CSS, JS, and fonts. NitroPack achieves similar functionality through Cloudflare.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
Included in the price or pay extra?	Yes, included	Yes, included
What does the CDN serve?	Images, HTML, CSS, JS, fonts	Images, HTML, CSS, JS, fonts
CDN provider	bunny.net	Cloudflare
Purge CDN cache in 1 click	Yes, but CDN cache is cleared only if images are updated	Yes
Custom subdomain	No	No

Other optimizations

Both plugins provide DNS prefetching, preloading, and GZIP/BRotli compression functionalities. However, it’s unclear whether NitroPack supports preconnecting to required origins.

	FastPixel	NitroPack
DNS prefetch	Yes	Yes
Preconnect to required origins	Yes	Unknown
Preload requests	Yes	Yes
GZIP/BRotli compression	Yes	Yes

Pricing structure

FastPixel offers various plans billed monthly or yearly for one website, including a free plan. The cheapest plan starts at $10 per month for a website that has approximately 50,000 page views/month. All plans include all available features, image optimization, and unlimited CDN traffic.

NitroPack’s entry-level plan kicks off at $21 per month, catering to websites with around 50,000 monthly page views. The only drawback is its requirement to contact sales for a custom plan if you wish to extend the usage to more websites. Moving up to the second tier, which includes adaptive images, comes in at $51 per month.

Takeaways

Both FastPixel and NitroPack are solid picks for boosting WordPress performance, but they each bring something different to the table.

FastPixel nails it with its top-tier image optimization, adaptive resizing, and budget-friendly plans. It’s perfect if you want advanced features without breaking the bank, plus it has a built-in CDN to keep your site running fast.

NitroPack, on the other hand, is great if you’re after a simple solution and don’t mind spending a bit more.

At the end of the day, they’re both great, but if advanced image handling and affordability are your priorities, FastPixel is hard to beat.