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Getting Started

Where to find the settings​

After activating the plugin, go to Dotjuice → Page speed in your WordPress admin menu. Settings are organised into nine tabs: Caching, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, Images, Preload, CDN, Database, and Advanced.

Every toggle saves through a single Save Settings button in the top toolbar — changes aren't applied until you click it. A Clear Cache button sits next to it for whenever you want to force a fresh rebuild of every cached page.

Sensible defaults​

The plugin ships with the safest, most broadly compatible optimisations already switched on: page caching, mobile-aware caching, CSS/JS minification, CSS combining, JS deferring, HTML minification, emoji script removal, lazy loading, font-display swap, cache preloading after publish, and font preloading. These are the settings virtually every WordPress site benefits from with no downside.

Settings that carry more risk of visibly breaking a page if your theme or plugins do something unusual — CSS/JS combining across the board, async CSS loading, JavaScript delay-until-interaction, CDN rewriting — are left off by default so you can enable and test them deliberately.

The one-time setup step: enabling the fast cache path​

For the fastest possible caching (page loads served in milliseconds rather than tens of milliseconds), your site needs one line added to wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_CACHE', true );

The plugin tries to add this automatically when you activate it. If it can't — for example because wp-config.php isn't writable by PHP on your hosting — you'll see a persistent notice in your admin dashboard with a Retry automatically button, or you can add the line yourself just above the /* That's all, stop editing! */ comment.

Your site works fine without this. If the automatic fast path isn't available, caching still runs through a normal WordPress request — just a little slower than the bypass path. Nothing breaks; you simply don't get the absolute fastest response times until it's in place.

  1. Leave the defaults as they are for your first save — they're the safest baseline.
  2. Set your LCP image on the Preload tab (see Preload) — this is the single highest-impact five-minute change you can make for your PageSpeed score.
  3. Clear your cache and reload your site in an incognito/private window to confirm everything looks right.
  4. Work through the optional tabs one at a time — CSS async loading and JS delay give the biggest additional speed gains but are worth testing on staging first if your site is complex (see the warnings in CSS Optimisation and JavaScript Optimisation).

If something looks broken after enabling a setting​

Every optimisation on this plugin can be switched off individually. If a page looks wrong after a change:

  1. Click Clear Cache (top toolbar or the button in your WordPress admin bar) and reload — a stale cached page is the most common cause of "it looks broken."
  2. If it's still wrong, turn off the most recently changed setting and clear the cache again.
  3. See Troubleshooting for the settings most likely to cause visible issues and what they need to work safely.