xSpeed Cache: AI-Powered Performance Hub with MCP, Caching & CDN

Changelog

[1.2.3] – 2026-09-02

xSpeed now recognises which plugin owns the page cache and refuses to take it, so installing beside WP Rocket, WP Super Cache or LiteSpeed no longer switches thirteen features on behind you or leaves two page caches competing. Switching caching on is now all-or-nothing, so a half-finished attempt can no longer leave a site with a broken wp-config.php. Combining CSS no longer strips a site’s styles when Critical CSS is on, and page builders can be edited again.

Caching:
– New: xSpeed recognises which plugin owns the page cache before switching anything on, and stands down when the field is taken. A site already running another cache plugin installs with every feature held off and that plugin’s files untouched, instead of coming up with thirteen switches on.
– New: Switching page caching on is now all-or-nothing. The drop-in, the wp-config.php line, the rewrite rules and the settings are written as one step and rolled back together if any part fails, so a half-finished attempt can no longer leave the site in a state it cannot recover from.
– Fixed: Enabling the cache no longer corrupts wp-config.php, and a refusal is no longer reported as success.
– Fixed: The dashboard now names the plugin that blocked page caching instead of silently switching the toggle back off — on the dashboard and at the end of the setup wizard.
– Improved: The dashboard reports whether the cache is actually serving pages, rather than what the setting says it should be doing.
– Improved: Conflicting plugins are identified from one catalogue rather than two lists that had drifted apart. Swift Performance was missed entirely, and Autoptimize was wrongly reported as a page-cache conflict.
– Fixed: A “left cache files behind” note now names only the plugin that could have left them, and xSpeed no longer blames itself for its own cache folder while inactive.
– Fixed: A stray WP_CACHE line left in wp-config.php by a removed plugin is no longer mistaken for another plugin owning the cache. A site with no cache plugin at all installed with everything switched off while the wizard said no conflicts were found, and reinstalling could not fix it, because uninstalling left those switches behind.
– Fixed: Hosts that were never in conflict are no longer refused.

Optimization:
– Fixed: Combining CSS no longer leaves the site unstyled when Critical CSS is on. Sheets deferred by Critical CSS were mistaken for print-only stylesheets, merged into a print-only bundle and stripped of the swap that applies them, so visitors were served a page with no styles at all.
– Fixed: A Google Fonts stylesheet is no longer cut in half when CSS is combined. Font addresses carry semicolons inside them, and the rule was truncated at the first one.
– Fixed: Delaying JavaScript no longer rewrites attributes belonging to other plugins, and a script keeps its own type.
– Fixed: Minification stands down on page-builder editing screens. Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, Brizy and Oxygen edit over a front-end address rather than inside the dashboard, so their editors were being minified and broken.
– Improved: The combined stylesheet is minified as one file, rather than only the parts that went into it.

Integrations:
– New: Another WPDeveloper plugin can now install xSpeed for you and have it come up with page caching on and nothing else switched on, without either plugin carrying its own copy of the rules.

AI tools:
– Improved: Tools generated from the plugin’s own commands now describe themselves for an assistant rather than for a terminal, so an AI agent picks the right one more often. This covers most of the tools on a Pro site.

[1.2.2] – 2026-08-31

Forms on cached pages stop being rejected, because a page is no longer served for longer than the security token it carries. Stores keep their cache through orders and reviews while price and stock changes actually clear it, the cache lifetime you configure is finally the one enforced, and the AI tools can no longer delete content without showing you what they found first.

Caching:
– Fixed: A form on a cached page no longer fails to submit. A cached page could outlive the security token baked into it, so on any site set above 24 hours every anonymous form — contact, checkout, add-to-cart, course enrolment — was rejected with the other plugin’s own error message. Pages carrying a token now expire with it, and pages without one keep the full lifetime.
– Fixed: The cache lifetime you configure is now the one that is enforced. The fast path applied a fixed 24 hours regardless of the setting, so a 12-hour lifetime served pages for up to 25 hours, and a 7-day one rebuilt the page from scratch for 6 days out of 7. Per-post expiry overrides now reach it too.
– Fixed: Editing a template, template part, global styles, a navigation menu or a synced pattern clears the cache again. None of those has a page of its own, so a Site Editor change updated nothing visitors could see until the lifetime ran out.
– Fixed: Saving a cache setting no longer replaces another cache plugin’s drop-in on a site where xSpeed page caching is switched off. That could leave the site with no page cache at all after xSpeed was later switched off.
– Improved: The activity log now names what triggered each purge — “Cache purged (hook:wp_update_nav_menu)” instead of a bare number.
– Fixed: A damaged compressed copy of a cached page is no longer sent to visitors. A copy that was cut off part-way through cannot be decompressed, so the browser threw away the page it had and drew a blank one instead. Compressed copies are now written in one step so a half-written one never becomes visible, and each is stored with its own length so one that does not match is skipped and the normal page is served.

WooCommerce:
– Fixed: A price, sale or stock change now clears the product’s cached pages. Those are written straight to the database without the hook the cache listened for, so a store could quote one price on a cached page and charge another at checkout for the whole cache lifetime. The product page, the shop archive, its category and tag archives and a storefront front page are all cleared.
– Fixed: Placing an order, a customer registering at checkout, or a visitor leaving a product review no longer wipes the entire site’s cache. Guest reviews are on by default, so any visitor could flush a store’s cache repeatedly with no account. A review now clears only the page it was left on, and only once approved.

AI tools:
– Fixed: The database cleanup tool can no longer permanently delete posts, revisions and comments without a scan first. A scan now issues a single-use token bound to what it found, and the cleanup refuses without one — including through the general command route, which previously bypassed the check entirely. Both tools now state plainly that the deletion cannot be undone.
– New: A public signals route (/xspeed/v1/signals) reports the plugin version and whether the AI server and Hub are connected, so external audit tools can identify the site. No tokens, accounts or paths are exposed.
– Fixed: An admin who is deleted or removed from a site no longer leaves the site reporting a Hub connection that no longer exists.

Migration:
– New: The import offer now migrates in place. Pressing Import in the notice previously only navigated to another screen and asked you to find the button again; the consequence — that migrating deactivates the old plugin — is now stated under the button rather than in a dialog after the click.
– Fixed: A migration that worked no longer leaves both cache plugins active. The handover was refused whenever any part of the import fell short, and enabling the object cache always fails on a host without Redis or Memcached — so two page caches were left running, which is the exact conflict deactivating exists to prevent. An optional module that could not be enabled is now a footnote, not a failure.

Recommendations:
– Fixed: Pro features that are already switched on are no longer recommended for purchase. Image conversion is enabled per format and runs on defaults with nothing stored, so a site converting every upload was still told to buy image conversion, forever.
– Fixed: Recommendations reappear when Pro is deactivated or its licence expires. Pro leaves its settings behind, so reading those rows alone silently hid the suggestions on a site that was no longer running the feature.

Health:
– Fixed: Browser caching is reported from the headers actually served, not from xSpeed’s own snippet. A site whose caching headers come from its host, a container or a proxy was permanently warned about a problem it did not have and could not act on. A probe that fails to complete no longer counts as proof of a missing header.

[1.2.1] – 2026-08-27

Self-hosted videos no longer download in full before anyone presses play, the autopilot now undoes a change that makes the site slower instead of calling it verified, and the diagnosis finally reports the content problems it was measuring all along.

Optimization:
– Fixed: A self-hosted video with its own preload setting is no longer skipped. “Lazy-load HTML5 videos” now overrides a player’s preload=”auto” or “metadata”, which is where the setting was meant to help — a page carrying a 924KB video no longer transfers it before anyone presses play. Autoplaying videos are left alone.
– New: The click-to-play facade now covers self-hosted videos that have a poster image, not just YouTube and Vimeo embeds. The file downloads on click; without JavaScript the original video is still there.
– New: Each optimization step is now measured, and a change that makes the page measurably slower is undone instead of being reported as verified. A change inside normal run-to-run variation is reported as unchanged rather than claimed as a win.
– Fixed: An image the theme has already marked as the most important one on the page is no longer lazy-loaded, which delayed the very image it was told to prioritise.

Diagnosis and reporting:
– Fixed: The reported score came from the oldest audit on record rather than the newest, so re-measuring never moved the number. The newest successful run is now used, and a failed audit is never presented as the current score.
– Fixed: Page weight, heavy videos and DOM size were measured but never shown. The content problems only a person can fix are now reported alongside the settings the plugin can change itself.
– New: The last audit’s own named opportunities, with their measured savings, now feed the diagnosis — routed to either the settings the plugin can change or the content a person has to.

Reliability:
– Fixed: A missing plugin file no longer takes down wp-admin. xSpeed now stops cleanly and names the file that is missing, so the Plugins screen still loads and the plugin can be switched off to recover.
– Fixed: An unresolvable class is reported with the path of the file that is missing, rather than only the class name, so an interrupted update or a quarantined file can be identified from the log.

Caching:
– New: The cache is cleared when a plugin, theme or WordPress core is updated, so a page is never served from markup the updated code no longer produces. It clears network-wide on multisite, can be switched off, and leaves the cache alone for a plugin you installed but never activated or for a nightly language-pack update.
– Improved: Visitors arriving with a tracking parameter such as utm_source, fbclid or gclid are now served from the fast path instead of loading WordPress in full.
– Fixed: Add-ons can now read the signal that says the cache was already cleared by an update, so the cache is no longer cleared a second time.

Settings and AI tools:
– New: A setting that is accepted but has no effect on your server now says so. Enabling Brotli on a server without Brotli support reported plain success while nothing changed; the tools that flip the setting now report the same warning the dashboard shows.
– Fixed: A URL field that is posted to now rejects an address that cannot be called. An email address entered in one of these fields was silently accepted and the feature then failed with nothing on screen to explain why.
– Fixed: Score history now reports whether each audit succeeded, and the error when one did not, so a failed run is no longer indistinguishable from a run that returned no score.

Dashboard:
– Fixed: Switching tabs on Health & insights no longer jumps the page back to the top.
– Fixed: A shorter tab is no longer padded out to the height of the tallest one, which left a screen of blank space below the content. Tab strips are also fully wired for screen readers and keyboard navigation.

Setup wizard:
– Fixed: The wizard opens with Balanced selected instead of no preset, warns in both directions when a setting is changed away from the preset, and uses the same labels throughout.
– Fixed: A brand-new install showed all three preset cards as inactive, because nothing had been configured yet. The cache lifetime also starts at 7 days rather than empty.

[1.2.0] – 2026-08-24

One command now measures your site, applies the settings that help, and undoes anything that breaks. Four cache-poisoning routes are closed, importing from W3 Total Cache carries settings across faithfully instead of a handful, and combined JavaScript keeps running in the order the page expects.

Security:
– Fixed: A page rendered with a query string is no longer stored under the bare URL’s cache key, where it would then be served to every visitor asking for the plain URL.
– Fixed: Percent-encoded query keys can no longer poison the cache. Two spellings of the same key resolved to different cache keys, so a crafted URL could seed the entry a normal request would later read.
– Fixed: An allow-listed tracking parameter no longer lets a crafted URL overwrite a cached page.
– Fixed: A search-results page no longer poisons the homepage through the cache key.

Optimization:
– Added: wp xspeed optimize and the optimize_site AI tool make the whole tuning loop one command. It measures the site, applies the recommended settings one at a time, re-checks the page after each change, and reverts anything that breaks it — then reports what it applied, what it undid and why, and what it could not reach at all (page weight, hotlinked images, DOM size) rather than claiming a win it did not make.
– Added: Images hosted on another domain get their real dimensions resolved, so lazy loading and the preloader no longer skip them.

Migration:
– Fixed: Importing from W3 Total Cache brought across 8 of 510 settings. Page cache, browser cache, object cache, exclusions and compression now map to their xSpeed equivalents.
– Fixed: Disabling W3 Total Cache’s master Minify switch is now respected. Its child CSS/JS settings stay populated while the master is off, so reading them alone imported minification and combination as enabled on a site that had deliberately turned them off.
– Fixed: An encrypted Redis password that cannot be read is now reported rather than silently dropped, so the object cache no longer fails to connect with nothing on screen to explain why.
– Fixed: An object-cache endpoint written as tls://host:port imported a host that could never resolve. The host and port are now imported and the dropped transport is stated, since xSpeed connects over plain TCP.
– Fixed: Compression enabled only for “other” file types no longer imports GZIP as switched off.
– Fixed: A partial import no longer switches off the plugin it imported from, and no longer shows a finished “Imported” state with no way to retry.
– Fixed: WP Super Cache is detected and imported. Its settings are stored under different keys than the importer looked for, so it reported nothing to import.
– Fixed: Page caching is actually enabled by an import that says it is.

Caching:
– Fixed: Ignored query parameters are matched by whole name rather than as substrings, so utm_source no longer matches an unrelated parameter that merely contains it.
– Fixed: Purging a URL on a non-standard port deleted nothing.
– Fixed: Query-string requests skip only the cache write, not the HTML transforms, so those pages keep their minification and lazy loading.

CSS and JavaScript:
– Fixed: Combined JavaScript is split by print group, so scripts registered for the footer are no longer hoisted into the head and run before first paint.
– Fixed: The combined bundle is carried on an existing handle rather than a new one, preserving inline payloads attached to it and the surrounding cascade order.
– Fixed: Configuration a page builder attaches late — Elementor writes elementorFrontendConfig on wp_footer, long after combining runs — now prints ahead of the combined bundle instead of behind it, so scripts no longer initialise against a config that does not exist yet.

CDN:
– Fixed: Changing the CDN URL clears Elementor’s render caches, which stored the previous URLs in their markup.

Interface:
– Fixed: The setup wizard and the ⌘K search palette no longer render underneath the WordPress admin menu.
– Fixed: Opening a panel no longer shifts the page behind it when the dashboard is scrolled away from the top.
– Fixed: The Apply button on a Pro recommendation works instead of failing silently. Free and Pro name their recommendations differently, and only Free’s were understood by the button both of them use.
– Added: The MCP server appears on the Overview as a capability card, so an AI connection can be set up without hunting for the panel.

MCP server:
– Fixed: OAuth discovery keeps working when another plugin claims /.well-known/.

Server configuration:
– Fixed: URL exclusions are mirrored into the generated nginx snippet, so nginx no longer serves cached copies of pages xSpeed was told to exclude.

[1.1.8] – 2026-08-20

Importing settings from another caching plugin no longer switches that plugin off without asking. Purging CSS or JavaScript now also clears the pages that link them, a failed save no longer reports success, and another MCP plugin’s AI connections keep working alongside xSpeed.

Migration:

• Fixed: Importing settings no longer deactivates the plugin you imported from as an unavoidable side effect. The panel now offers both outcomes: “Import & switch to xSpeed” and “Import settings only.” Previously, the only way to decline was Cancel, which also abandoned the import. WP-CLI and MCP did the opposite and left both plugins running silently; all three now behave consistently.
• Fixed: On a multisite network, a single site’s administrator can no longer switch off a network-activated caching plugin for every site on the network. WordPress refuses the same action from its own Plugins screen.
• Fixed: Choosing to leave the other plugin running now raises a Health item naming the plugin and the risk, so two page caches competing for the drop-in don’t go unnoticed. It clears itself once the plugin is switched off.
• Fixed: LiteSpeed’s exclusion lists are stored as JSON and were imported literally, causing imported exclusions to never match anything.

Caching:

• Fixed: Purging CSS or JavaScript now also purges the pages that link those files. Cached pages could keep pointing to deleted combined assets, leaving them unstyled until another page purge occurred.
• Fixed: A single POST request no longer keeps a visitor on the uncached path for the rest of their visit. Previously, one form submission or comment could cause every later page to be generated from scratch.
• Fixed: Cache now purges when any module’s settings change, not only the cache module’s.

CSS and JavaScript:

• Fixed: “Defer” and “Delay” now apply to the external script itself rather than an inline block queued before it, preventing execution order issues.
• Fixed: Combined JavaScript keeps its declared dependencies, so scripts no longer run before the libraries they need.
• Fixed: Inline style and script blocks are now minified, and anything deliberately skipped clearly indicates why.

Settings and interface:

• Fixed: A failed save no longer shows the green “Settings saved” toast. The failure now stays visible instead of disappearing with the toast.
• Fixed: Settings writes with keys that would be silently dropped are now refused instead of being accepted and discarded.
• Fixed: A cleared URL field stays cleared instead of reverting to its previous value.
• Fixed: Sub-sections of a disabled feature now collapse with it.
• Fixed: A failing server snippet now identifies the problem instead of showing only a status code.

MCP server:

• Fixed: xSpeed no longer answers another MCP plugin’s OAuth discovery URLs. Previously, its rule could match every .well-known discovery address on the site and return xSpeed’s details, preventing AI assistants from connecting correctly to other MCP plugins.

Security:

• Fixed: The MCP server’s dynamic client registration is now bounded with limits on stored clients, redirect URIs, name and URI length, plus per-IP rate limiting on the registration endpoint.
• Fixed: MCP and WP-CLI settings writes are now gated by the Pro license, matching the dashboard.

[1.1.7] – 2026-08-17

On a multisite network, a change to one site no longer wipes every other site’s cache. Cache cleanup no longer deletes stylesheets a live page is still using, and a consent banner styled by another plugin stays styled.

Caching:
– Fixed: On a multisite network, each site’s cache is now cleared on its own. Changing a setting, publishing a post, or clicking Purge on one site previously deleted the cached pages of every other site on the network, so the cache was rarely warm for anyone.
– Fixed: Cache cleanup no longer deletes a combined stylesheet or script that cached pages are still pointing at. Those pages carried on being served while their CSS and JavaScript returned “not found”, leaving a site unstyled and unresponsive — and invisible to the owner, whose own browser still held the old copy.

CSS and JavaScript:
– Fixed: “Load CSS Asynchronously” no longer breaks a stylesheet another plugin has already made non-render-blocking. A cookie-consent banner in that position loaded with none of its styling applied, in both logged-in and logged-out states.

Settings:
– New: List settings — cache exclusions, ignored parameters and the rest — now show the stock value beside the box you edit, with a Reset action to restore it. These are lists where one wrong entry can quietly stop a whole section of the site being cached, and there was previously no way to see how far a list had drifted.
– Improved: The box you edit is now labelled, and Reset sits on it rather than beside the defaults.

Accessibility:
– Fixed: Hint text, captions and status pills now meet the AA contrast minimum in light mode. The worst affected was the “Off” state pill — the only thing communicating whether a feature was on.

[1.1.6] – 2026-08-13

A search-results page could be cached and served as your home page. Combining CSS no longer strips a site’s styling, Pro settings can no longer be changed without an active licence, and an AI assistant now reports this site’s tier and audits the page you actually asked for.

Security:
– Fixed: A single search request could replace your cached home page. With search caching on, one visit to a search URL was stored as the site’s front page, so every later visitor — and search engines — were served those results instead. The cached copy was handed out by the web server without WordPress running, so it kept being served until the cache was cleared. Search pages are now kept out of that store entirely.

CSS and JavaScript:
– Fixed: Combining CSS files could leave a site completely unstyled — no missing files, no errors, just the theme’s styling gone. WordPress can inline a stylesheet it considers small, and doing so dropped the combined file that every other stylesheet had been folded into. Combining now happens on the finished page, after WordPress has made those decisions, so what you see in the browser is what was combined.
– Fixed: A stylesheet saved with a byte-order mark — common in files edited on Windows — no longer breaks the styling of every file combined after it.
– Fixed: Fonts and stylesheets brought in by an @import rule are no longer dropped when their file is combined with others.

AI assistants and WP-CLI:
– Fixed: On a site without an active Pro licence, Pro settings can no longer be changed through WP-CLI or an AI assistant. The dashboard already showed them locked; four write routes and the image recommendation did not enforce it, so a change made that way appeared to succeed.
– Fixed: A refused change is now reported as a refusal. It previously returned success over settings it had not written, in both the REST response and the command’s exit code.
– New: run_score runs an external performance audit from any install, and honours the provider you configured — asking for GTmetrix no longer silently runs PageSpeed Insights instead.
– Fixed: An AI assistant asking what this site is now gets the truth about its tier. On a Pro site with a lapsed licence it previously reported the licence as active.
– Improved: A PageSpeed audit started from an assistant now measures the page you asked for. It previously measured the home page whatever URL was given, and reported success.

Cache:
– Fixed: Turning the page cache off, or uninstalling xSpeed, now removes the WP_CACHE setting it added to your wp-config.php. It was only removed when written exactly one way, so most sites kept a stale setting behind after the cache was switched off — including after the plugin was deleted.

Compatibility:
– Fixed: wp xspeed purge no longer clears the page cache on Apache servers without mod_headers, where the cache could not be served from disk anyway.

Accessibility:
– Fixed: Two buttons — the nginx snippet’s copy control and the MCP panel’s tool list — now show a focus ring again when reached by keyboard. They suppressed the outline entirely, which left anyone navigating by Tab with no indication of where they were.

Settings:
– Improved: Duration fields now show what the number means in plain words — “6 hours”, “1 day 12 hours” — for every value, not only round ones.

[1.1.5] – 2026-08-11

AI assistants can change your settings again, and the cache preloader works on sites without a readable sitemap.

AI assistants and WP-CLI:
– Fixed: An AI assistant can read and change your xSpeed settings again. The two tools that do this were dropped from the catalog on every site, so an assistant — including the one connected through the Hub — was told they did not exist and could only fall back to raw commands.
– New: wp xspeed settings list|get|update — read and change any module’s settings from the command line, and from an AI assistant through the same commands.
– Improved: Settings for Pro features are no longer readable or writable over WP-CLI or an AI connection on a site without an active licence. The dashboard already hid them; these two surfaces did not.
– Improved: Credentials still cannot be set from the command line or an AI assistant. Asking to now names the field it refused rather than reporting success over an unchanged key.

Preloading:
– Fixed: On a site whose sitemap can’t be read, the preloader now warms your most recent pages straight from your content instead of silently queueing nothing. This affected two common setups that are not misconfigurations: sites discouraging search engines (where WordPress disables the sitemap outright, standard on staging and pre-launch sites), and SEO plugins that serve their own sitemap at a path we were never told about.
– Fixed: When a crawl can’t start at all, the preloader panel now says “Couldn’t start” and names the reason, rather than reporting “Ready” over an empty run.
– Improved: The explanation appears while the crawl is running, not only once it finishes — on a large site that is the difference between watching an unexplained crawl for hours and knowing why on the first tick.
– Fixed: wp xspeed preloader status no longer fails with an internal error after a crawl that ended with nothing queued. An AI assistant asking why a preload failed now gets the actual reason instead of a type error.

Branding:
– Improved: New xSpeed Cache logo and wordpress.org banners.

[1.1.4] – 2026-08-09

Stored credentials are now encrypted, exclusions are enforced by the server itself, and the cache cleans up after itself.

Security:
– Fixed: Stored credentials — API tokens, keys, and object-cache passwords — are now encrypted at rest and never returned in full by the dashboard, REST API, or an AI assistant. They were previously readable in plain text by anyone who could reach those endpoints. Existing values are encrypted automatically on upgrade; nothing needs re-entering.
– Improved: An AI assistant can no longer write credentials unless you explicitly grant it that permission when connecting.
– Improved: Cloudflare settings are verified when you save them, so a wrong token or zone is reported straight away instead of failing silently on the next purge.

Caching:
– New: Expired cache entries and orphaned minified assets are now collected on a schedule, so the cache directory no longer grows without bound on a busy site.
– Fixed: Excluded cookies and bypassed user agents are now enforced on the fast path the web server serves directly. Previously they applied only while a page was cold, so a warm page could serve the shared anonymous copy to carts, members and …