Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin: Settings and Usage Guide

What is Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin ∞

If you’re interested in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is better to get familiar with the Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin. This tool is a comprehensive solution designed to enhance your WordPress website’s performance, security, and SEO. Let’s delve into what this plugin offers.

Optimizing Your Website Code with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

The Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin is a master at cleaning up your website’s code. It removes unnecessary elements, fixes bugs from other plugins, and speeds up the indexing process for search engines. The result is a faster, more efficient, and user-friendly website, which helps the SEO.

Boosting SEO with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

It’s worth mentioning that the Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin is also an excellent tool for SEO improvement. Its features include eliminating duplicate pages, optimizing your robots.txt file, and automatically inserting the ‘alt’ attribute for images. Users have reported significant performance improvements on platforms like Pingdom, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, and YSlow after using Clearfy.

Enhancing Performance with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

The Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin doesn’t stop at SEO and code optimization. It also enhances your website’s performance by minifying HTML, CSS, and JS files, reducing their size, and speeding up website loading. It provides options to defer JS and CSS, turn off RSS feeds and emojis, remove jQuery Migrate, turn off embeds, and more.

Securing Your Website with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

Security is crucial to any website, and the Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin covers you. It offers features to hide the author’s login, hide WordPress login error messages, disable XML-RPC, remove X-Pingback links, and more. These features help to fortify your WordPress website against potential threats.

Managing WordPress Updates with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

The Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin also simplifies the management of WordPress updates. It allows you to control automatic plugins, themes, and WordPress core updates. You can also turn off update notifications for users without permission to update themes, plugins, and WordPress core.

Controlling WordPress Comments with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

Comments can be great to engage with your audience, but they can also be a source of spam. The Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin provides options to turn off comments overall or for selected post types, remove comments, close comments, remove the URL/website field from the comment form, and more.

Managing Admin Notices with Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin

The Clearfy Cache WordPress plugin helps you manage admin notices. It provides an option to turn off admin notices, hiding all or selected notifications of the WordPress admin. This feature can help to streamline your admin dashboard and keep it clutter-free.

The Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin is a Multi-Tool

There is much more you can do with the Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin. Also, they have an excessive extension list you can install from inside the plugin. Some of them are free, and some are premium.

Installing Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin ∞

You can install the plugin using our WordPress Plugin Installation Guide article of our Complete SEO Guide Box.
Search for: Clearfy Cache – WordPress optimization plugin, Minify HTML, CSS & JS, Defer By Creative Motion.

Setting Up Clearfy Cache WordPress Plugin ∞

Login to your WordPress Dashboard.
On the left side menu bar, hover with the mouse cursor over [Settings], then click on [Clearfy] in the pop-up menu.

Note: Hovering with mouse cursor over question mark icons next to any feature will show you what the feature does.

Components

On the left menu of the Clearfy page, click on the [COMPONENTS] tab.

These freemium components should be activated: Updates manager, Cache, Html minify, Minify and combine (JS, CSS), Widgets tools, Disable admin notices, Admin bar manager, Yoast SEO optimization.

These freemium components should be deactivated: Asset manager, Robin image optimizer, Firewall and Malware scanner, Hide login page, Google Analytics Cache, Comments tools, Transliteration of Cyrillic alphabet.

We deactivate components we don’t use to make our site more responsive and secure.

The asset manager is a great component, but only for advanced users who know what they’re doing. It lets you remove components like JavaScript and CSS files from loading, which can make your site lighter. But you can easily break things if you’re unsure what it is. So, we deactivate it.

Robin image optimizer is a good plugin if you’re unfamiliar with alternatives. However, we’re optimizing images offline on our computer with the RIOT Windows program, which is more optimal.

The Firewall and Malware scanner is also an excellent component. However, we’ll use a better plugin for security and malware scanning.

Hide login page: this component is not bad. Theoretically, you can change the “wp-admin” of your URL accessing the WordPress dashboard to something else. This will significantly diminish adversaries trying to attack your “wp-admin” page. But this is too much messing with WordPress core, which usually can break things up. Also, we’re using the protection of wp-admin through CloudFlare CDN.

Google Analytics Cache: It is a good idea to cache Google Analytics JS files, but more customizable plugins like “CAOS | Host Google Analytics Locally By Daan van den Bergh” are available. Also, we suggest using Plausible Analytics, which is more optimal and user-privacy friendly.

Comments tools: this component can hide the “Website” field requirement from your comments section. This is not always working, so we’ll use another method through our child theme’s “functions.php” file. Also, there is an option to convert URLs in comments to JavaScript code, which, in theory, enhances the SEO of your site since the link is not easily visible. The problem is that this feature adds “url-span.css” and “url-span.js” (which adds “jQuery.js), which in turn adds more unneeded weight to our site. This was in older versions. Not sure how it works now.

Transliteration of Cyrillic alphabet is more relevant to Cyrillic language-enabled sites that this feature supports. Since we’re writing in English, this is less relevant.

Performance

On the left menu of the Clearfy page, click on the [PERFORMANCE] tab.
These should be your settings on this page:

“Minify Html code”

Optimize HTML Code? On
This feature will minify the HTML page that the server will serve to the end user, reducing its size and page load time.

Keep HTML comments? Off
Setting this “off” will remove all the HTML comments that the developers left on the page. These comments may provide WordPress or plugin versions, usage, or any other data that can compromise the security of your site. When adversaries know the specific version or plugin you use, they can exploit known bugs in these versions. Also, these comments aren’t visible to the user in regular browsing of the site, only when someone views the source of any page.

“Clear the unnecessary scripts”

Disable Emojis: On
While emojis may sound like a cool feature that enhances user experience, in reality, this feature is useless for a content site striving for dominance in SEO and Google SERPs. By removing emojis altogether, you reduce the number of requests to your site and the size of the pages each time a user browser requests it, reducing the Bandwidth of your hosting plan and site loading time.

Disable Embeds: On
The “embeds” allow you to embed videos from online platforms such as YouTube, providing attractive previews. However, this process involves WordPress loading a JavaScript file named “wp-embed.min.js” on every site page, even if you don’t embed a video on these pages. If it’s unnecessary for your needs, consider deactivating it. Enhancing speed leads to fewer HTTP queries.

Remove bloat in head: On
Please refer for help on this feature, but among other features, it removes links to previous and next comments, meaning a cleaner-looking site.

Disable gravatars: On
Gravatars are user avatars in the comment section. As with emojis, this sounds cool but less important for a new WordPress site or its SEO. In addition, you can turn off avatars at all in WordPress Discussion Settings.

“Fonts and Maps”

Font Awesome asynchronous: On
Disable Dashicons: On
Google Fonts asynchronous: On
Disable Google Fonts: On
Disable Google maps: On
Remove iframe Google maps: On
Remove iframe Google maps: On

You should check if your theme uses these features. Turning off these settings doesn’t hurt the Astra theme that we use in our Complete SEO Guide Box.

“Heartbeat”

Disable Heartbeat: [Only allow when editing Posts/Pages]
Heartbeat frequency: WordPress Default

Read the description of the “Heartbeat” section. In general, while browsing the WordPress admin console, heartbeat always sends requests to the server to show you the information in real-time. In most cases, you don’t need this. You can hit refresh at any time. The only place where you need real-time view is when you create or edit a post. While on the post-edit page, many processes happen when you write and edit text, so this is important. Remember not to leave your browser open on the post-edit page since your server’s CPU can be high at this time.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Performance: Optimize CSS & JS

On the left menu on the Clearfy page, under the [PERFORMANCE] tab, click on [Optimize CSS & JS].

Note: Clearfy has great minification and CSS JS aggregation/combine features. If you’re not using the Astra theme (we are in our Complete SEO Guide Box), make sure you turn one feature on or off at a time, saving settings, checking how your site looks, checking the site performance with performance testing tools to see that your actions improved the overall site performance. Remember to flush all the caches before testing with performance tools.

“Misc Options”

Also optimize JS/CSS for logged in editors/administrators? Off
You don’t want the administration panel minified. There is no point in that. First of all, you will need to clear the cache each time you change settings, and also, you don’t care if the administration console is the fastest or not. It is not indexed in Search Engines, so why bother?

“Optimize CSS”

Optimize CSS Code? On
This is the CSS Minification feature.

Aggregate CSS-files? On
This feature will combine all CSS files into one. The action will reduce the number of requests for all CSS files to only one.

Remove Version from Stylesheet? On

Click on the [Advanced Options] button.

Also aggregate inline CSS? Off
This feature will also combine CSS code not in the CSS files but inside the site code. For us, it broke the site, so we don’t enable it.

Generate data: URIs for images? On
This feature will inline small background images into CSS, lowering the number of requests.

Inline and Defer CSS? Off
The feature does some optimizations after the page loads. This is problematic in the Astra theme (we’re using it in our Complete SEO Guide Box), but it can also be in other themes. Also, it can change the page layout after loading it, lowering the CLS score (GTmetrix). So, this should stay off.

Inline all CSS? Off
This feature will add all the CSS scripts from files to the page. Let’s say you have three CSS files. With this enabled, you will have 0 since all the CSS code will be inside the page code itself. The help says it doesn’t do much when the site has many page views. So, when your site has more viewers, you must deactivate it, but you will not remember it.

Critical CSS files: astra/assets/css/minified/main.min.css
This list is responsible for telling Clearfy Cache plugin, when it minifies the CSS files, that this list of files is critical and will be treated as like. Since we’re using the Astra theme in our guide, the file

astra/assets/css/minified/main.min.css

is critical. Unpredictable things can happen if Clearfy minifies and aggregates it like the rest of the CSS files. For example, guest users can see the admin’s toolbar on the top of the regular content page. So, we fix it by stating that this CSS is special.

“Optimize JavaScript”

Optimize JavaScript Code? On
Aggregate JS-files? On
Remove Version from Script (Recommended): On
Exclude scripts from Мinify And Combine: seal.js, js/jquery/jquery.js, /wp-json/

Note: The default values for “Exclude scripts from Мinify And Combine” are

seal.js, js/jquery/jquery.js

but since we’ll be using Plausible Analytics, we need to add also

, /wp-json/

so their plugin can work properly.

Click on the [Advanced Options] button.
All the options should be “off”.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Performance: Cache

On the left menu on the Clearfy page, under the [PERFORMANCE] tab, click on [Cache].

“Cache settings”

Enable cache: On
Don’t cache for logged-in users: On
Gzip: On
Browser Caching: Off

Note: We already use “Browser Caching” from CloudFlare. If you decided not to use it with CloudFlare, you should enable the “Browser Caching” setting here.

Click on the [Advanced options] button.
Mobile: On
Create cache for mobile theme: On
Widget Cache: On
Preload cache: Off
Clear cache for new post: On
Clear cache for updated Post: On

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

SEO

On the left menu of the Clearfy page, click on the [SEO] tab.

“Basic SEO optimization settings”

Automatically set the alt attribute (Recommended): On

Create right robots.txt: Off
We will use the same feature from the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, which is more powerful and targeted purely for SEO.

“Server headers and response”

Automatically insert the Last Modified header (Recommended): Off
Return an If-Modified-Since response (Recommended)”: Off
These are more server-related features; you should check the manual if needed.

“For the Yoast SEO plugin”

Remove comment from head section (Recommended): On
This section is relevant since we will use the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin for all our SEO activities. However, the only thing that is safe to enable is the feature to remove the comments. Comments are useless for the end user, and they will make our site lighter and faster. We don’t recommend other features that alter the default operation of Yoast SEO since these guys know what they’re doing.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Updates

On the left menu of the Clearfy page, click on the [UPDATES] tab.

“General settings for WordPress, plugins and themes updates”

Plugin Updates: Manual updates
Theme Updates: Manual updates
Disable Automatic Translation Updates: Off
WordPress Core Updates: [Disable auto updates]
Enable updates for VCS Installations: Off
Updates nags only for Admin: Off

You don’t want any of your updates to be automatic. If there is an update, it doesn’t matter if it is a WordPress core update or plugins. You should back up your site first! Then, update anything you want manually. If the process is automatic, you need to set up your backups to be automated. But there is no way for you to check that the automatic backup worked a hundred percent. So, you’d better do manual backups, ensure they work fine, and only then process the updates manually.

“Updates nags only for Admin” since you’re the only user that can log in to the WordPress Dashboard, this feature is irrelevant.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Defence

On the Clearfy page’s left menu, click the [DEFENCE] tab.

“Base settings”

Hide author login: On
Hide errors when logging into the site: Off
Disable XML-RPC: On

The “Hide errors when logging into the site” feature is useless. They wanted to eliminate user enumeration on the “wp-admin” login page, which means that when you input the correct user name and wrong password, the error message will tell you that only the password is incorrect. Thus revealing to the attacker that the username is correct. But the default error message states:

ERROR: The username or password is incorrect. Did you lose your password?

Each time, you enter the username right or wrong. It doesn’t matter. The error message doesn’t help the user enumerate since it doesn’t tell you the username is correct, even if it is. If you enable this feature, then the error message will be:

ERROR: Wrong login or password

Which is the same context. Probably in older versions of WordPress, the error message was different.

“Hide WordPress versions”

Remove html comments: On
The feature will remove useless HTML comments, making the site lighter and faster.

Remove meta generator (Recommended): On
The feature will improve the site’s security while removing versions from comments, which means that potential adversaries won’t be able to exploit exact version-known bugs.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Advanced

On the Clearfy page’s left menu, click the [ADVANCED] tab.

“Admin notifications, Update nags”

Hide Admin notices: [Only Selected]
Any notices on the top of the admin panel can be hidden forever if you click “Hide notice.” If you turned off some notices and want to reset the settings and show them again, you can click this page’s [Reset notices] button.

“Other”

Disable RSS feeds: Off
With this option, you can remove RSS feeds. Leaving them enabled should not interfere with performance or SEO. It’s just that end users less utilize this feature lately. But for those users that do, you better leave the RSS feeds enabled.

“Classic editor and Gutenberg”

Disable revision: Off
Limit Post Revisions: [Wordpress default]
Gutenberg autosave control: Off

When you update a post, the older version is saved in the database so you can return to it later. You can turn off revisions of your posts to save space in the database, make the database more responsive, and turn off autosaves – the problem is that it is less convenient. You won’t have an option if you want to see what you wrote in this post in your previous revisions. But you can delete a paragraph by mistake or without noticing or whatever. So, we suggest leaving the revisions and autosave intact for a backup.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

Advanced: Widgets

On the left menu on the Clearfy page, under the [ADVANCED] tab, click on [Widgets].

“Disable unused widgets”

Read the description for this section.
Since we’re not using these widgets, we disable them:

Remove calendar widget: On
Remove the “Archives” widget: On
Remove the “Twenty Eleven Ephemera” widget: On

If there are more widgets that you do not use, remove them here. If you’re a beginner, you will probably need to use WordPress for some time to decide what widgets you need and which do not.

Click [SAVE] in the top menu.

CLEARFY SETTINGS

You can change more settings by clicking the [CLEARFY SETTINGS] button on the top of the Clearfy page. Here, you can Disable the menu in the adminbar, do a Complete Uninstall, and more settings related to the plugin itself rather than your WordPress installation.

Reset Settings to Defaults

In case something messed up your site, and you can’t put a finger to find what it is, you can try resetting this plugin to defaults.

On the left menu in Clearfy, click the [QUICK START] tab and scroll down to “RESET ALL SETTINGS.”
Click [Reset].

Flushing Clearfy Cache ∞

On the top menu (admin bar), hover with the mouse cursor over [Clearfy].
In the drop-down menu, click on [Clear all cache].

Cache Folders ∞

The cache folders, in most cases for all the cache plugins, will be:

public_html/wp-content/cache
public_html/wp-content/uploads

Other WordPress Caching Plugins ∞

Here is the list of other caching plugins we tested and what we found:

W3 Total Cache: Too complicated to set up. You need to try different settings, which is time-consuming.
LiteSpeed Cache: You can use it only if you have LiteSpeed Hosting.
WP Super Cache: There was a period when the plugin was not updated regularly, though it is now.
Fast Velocity Minify: In the past versions, there were issues.
WP Rocket: This is a pay-only plugin, though it should be fine.
WP Fastest: This one is OK, but Clearfy was better in the site speed tests.

If you find any mistakes or have ideas for improvement, please follow the email on the Contact page.