WordPress gave us a platform to build on. Millions of developers, designers, and site owners built it into what it is today: an open, community-driven project that powers more than 40% of the web.
With BerqWP v4, we’re giving something back.
BerqWP Local Optimization is completely free. No license. No account. No expiry. Just install the plugin, switch to Local method, and your site gets faster immediately.
Here’s everything it does.
What Is Local Optimization?
BerqWP has always used cloud servers to optimize WordPress sites. Our Photon Engine handles the heavy lifting off your server, generating critical CSS, converting images, and delivering optimized pages via our global CDN.
That’s still available, and still the most powerful option. But we heard from a lot of people in the WordPress community who wanted something different: a free, self-contained optimization tool that runs entirely on their own server, with no external dependencies.
That’s Local Optimization.
When you select Local as your optimization method in BerqWP > Dashboard, the plugin handles everything on your own server using PHP. Nothing is sent to our servers. Nothing requires an account. It just works.
What You Get for Free
Full-Page Caching
BerqWP builds a complete, pre-optimized HTML cache of every page on your site. When a visitor arrives, they get the cached page instantly. WordPress and PHP don’t even load for that request.
On Apache servers, BerqWP automatically writes the rewrite rules into your .htaccess file on activation. No configuration needed. Cached pages are served directly by Apache, before any PHP code runs.
On Nginx servers, you can configure BerqWP’s cache rules manually to achieve the same server-level delivery.
The cache is smart: it skips logged-in users, WooCommerce cart sessions, and password-protected pages automatically. When you update a post, the cache for that page is cleared and rebuilt.
Four Optimization Modes
Local method gives you full control over how CSS and JavaScript are delivered:
| Mode | CSS | JavaScript |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | Browser default | Browser default |
| Smart | Asynchronous | Asynchronous |
| Blaze | Asynchronous | Delayed |
| Turbo | Delayed | Delayed |
Turbo gets the highest PageSpeed scores. Start there, and step down to Blaze or Smart if anything on your site breaks.
Lazy Loading
Images, background images, YouTube embeds, and Google Maps are all lazy loaded out of the box. They load only when they scroll into the visitor’s viewport, not all at once on page load.
LCP Image Preloading
BerqWP automatically detects the largest image on each page: the one Google uses to measure Largest Contentful Paint. It preloads that image with a <link rel="preload"> tag, per page, automatically. This is one of the highest-impact things you can do for LCP scores.
Image Dimension Attributes
Every image on your site gets explicit width and height attributes if they’re missing. This prevents layout shifts as the page loads, which directly improves your CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) score.
Prerender on Link Hover
When a visitor hovers over a link, BerqWP uses the browser’s Speculation Rules API to start prerendering the destination page in the background. By the time they click, the page is already loaded and navigation feels instant.
This is a modern browser API that works in Chrome and Edge today, with Safari and Firefox support on the way.
Font Optimization
BerqWP prioritizes font loading so text renders as early as possible, freeing bandwidth for other critical resources on slow connections.
URL Prefetching
BerqWP prefetches links as visitors browse, using the browser’s built-in prefetch capabilities. Pages load faster on every click, not just the first one.
Sandbox Mode
Before you push any settings live, test them in Sandbox Mode. Add ?berqwp to any URL to preview what your site looks like with the current optimization settings, without affecting real visitors at all.
Critical CSS (Developer Feature)
Critical CSS is the subset of your stylesheet needed to render what’s visible above the fold: the part of the page a visitor sees before they scroll. Inlining it directly in the <head> eliminates render-blocking CSS requests and makes pages visually complete much faster.
On BerqWP Cloud, critical CSS is generated by our cloud engine, per page, automatically, with no configuration needed.
On Local, critical CSS generation is available but disabled by default. You can enable it by adding a filter to your theme’s functions.php or a code snippets plugin:
add_filter( 'berqwp_local_critical_css', '__return_true' );
When enabled, BerqWP analyzes the page HTML, collects all linked stylesheets, and extracts only the CSS rules that match elements actually present on the page. That critical CSS is inlined in the <head> and all other stylesheets are deferred.
Because this runs on your server, generation adds some time to the first uncached request for each page. Expect anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds depending on your server’s performance and the number of stylesheets on the page. Subsequent visits are served from cache instantly, so real visitors won’t feel it.
It works well and will meaningfully improve your scores. The Cloud version goes further: it’s more precise, handles more edge cases, and is generated on our servers so there’s no impact on yours. But for a free, self-hosted solution, the Local version is solid.
Automatic Cache Invalidation
BerqWP watches for changes and clears the cache automatically when:
- A post or page is saved or updated
- A new comment is approved
- You switch themes
- You publish a new post (clears the homepage and related archives too)
You never need to manually flush cache after routine edits.
One Honest Thing to Know
Local Optimization is powerful and completely free. But if you want the full BerqWP experience: critical CSS generated by our cloud engine, WebP image conversion, Fluid Images with AVIF delivery, JavaScript execution tuning, our global CDN, and real-time Core Web Vitals monitoring, that’s BerqWP Cloud, which requires a license.
Local is our gift to the WordPress community. Cloud is our product. You can use Local forever without ever paying us a cent.
How to Get Started
- Install BerqWP from the WordPress plugin directory. Search for BerqWP or use the slug
searchpro - Activate the plugin
- Go to BerqWP > Dashboard
- Make sure Local is selected as your optimization method
- Set your optimization mode. We recommend starting with Turbo and testing from there
That’s it. No account, no license key, no setup wizard.
If you run into any issues, our documentation is at berqwp.com/help-center and our support team is at berqwp.com/support.
A Note to the WordPress Community
We’ve been building BerqWP for years. We’ve learned an enormous amount from the WordPress ecosystem: from the developers who share their knowledge openly, from the users who test things and report bugs, from the community that debates ideas in public.
Local Optimization is our way of putting something back in. Take it, use it, share it. We hope it makes your sites faster.
The BerqWP Team
