NitroPack Review 2026: An Easier Way To Speed Up Your Website?

Welcome to our NitroPack review.

NitroPack is one of our top recommendations for website performance. It promises to take the headache out of site speed optimization by doing everything for you, automatically.

But just how much does it really boost performance?

To find out, we put NitroPack to the test and compiled this in-depth review to share what we learned along the way.

Below, you’ll find a breakdown of our before and after speed tests, so you can see for yourself the kind of results you can expect with NitroPack.

Plus, you’ll also find a breakdown of all of the platform’s features, as well as its pros and cons, pricing, and everything else you need to know.

What is NitroPack?

NitroPack is a cloud-based, all-in-one website performance optimization solution that makes it easy to speed up your website.

The idea behind it is simple: It applies every single speed optimization to your website for you. Automatically. Without you having to write a single line of code.

Here’s why that’s so great.

Without NitroPack, you’d typically have to stitch together a bunch of different tools and plugins to handle different optimizations: a CDN, a caching plugin, a minification plugin, an image optimizer… and so on.

But the problem with that is that all of those plugins clog up your site. Plus, they’re not necessarily all designed to work together, so you can end up running into site-breaking conflicts.

NitroPack solves that problem. It can do the job of all those different tools from one platform. All you have to do is connect it to your site, choose your initial configuration options, and let it do its thing. It takes less than five minutes.

And the result? Significantly faster load times, and stronger user experience metrics (like the Core Web Vitals metrics).

We’ll take a closer look at everything NitroPack can do later when we get into the features. But first…

NitroPack speed test data (before/after)

Okay, let’s cut straight to the chase here.

The best way to review a website performance tool is to see how much it improves website performance, right?

So before I show you all of NitroPack’s features, we’re going to run some NitroPack tests and evaluate the data to see exactly how much of an impact it has on site speed.

Testing methodology

I wanted to make these tests as fair and realistic as I could.

So I started by creating a fresh new WordPress website, hosted on one of Bluehost’s shared hosting plans and running the Astra theme.

Then, I filled it out with some demo content by importing a bunch of dummy pages, posts, images, plugins, widgets, and menus through the Starter Template plugin. I made sure there were no other performance plugins activated on the test site other than NitroPack.

To run the tests, I used Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to compare performance benchmarks before and after running NitroPack. And I ran multiple tests with different NitroPack configurations to see how each configuration affected the results. 

I’ll break down the results of each test below.

PageSpeed Insights

Let’s start by looking at the results from PageSpeed Insights.

Before NitroPack:

First, I ran a test without NitroPack to get a baseline of my site’s speed before performance optimizations. Here’s what PageSpeed came back with:

On mobile:

On desktop:

These benchmarks weren’t that bad to begin with, but there was definitely room for improvement. So let’s look at what happened when I installed NitroPack.

After NitroPack (Standard Mode)

I initially configured NitroPack to run in Standard Mode. This is the lowest level that you can run NitroPack in, and it only deploys the most lightweight, basic optimizations.

Then, I ran a PageSpeed test again. Here’s what the results looked like this time.

On mobile:

On desktop:

As you can see, there was a modest improvement in performance scores on both mobile and desktop (but especially so on desktop) when I ran NitroPack in Standard mode. But I still think we can do better, so let’s try again with some additional optimizations. 

After NitroPack (Ludicrous Mode)

For the next test, I switched over to NitroPack’s Ludicrous Mode—the most aggressive setup, configured for maximum performance. 

And I also tweaked some custom configuration settings to turn on additional optimizations that weren’t on by default, like ‘reduce unused css’ and ‘delay scripts’.

Here are the results from that test on PageSpeed Insights:

On mobile:

On desktop: 

As you can see, performance really shot up in Ludicrous mode.

Results compared

Here’s a breakdown of the results from the PageSpeed tests in a side-by-side comparison table:

On mobile:

	Before NitroPack	After NitroPack (Standard mode)	After NitroPack (Ludicrous mode)
Performance score	73	78	89
First Contentful Paint	3.8 s	3.8 s	2.3 s
Largest Contentful Paint	4.8 s	3.8 s	2.4 s
Cumulative Layout Shift	0.028	0.084	0.137
Speed Index	4.2 s	3.8 s	3.1 s

On desktop:

	Before NitroPack	After NitroPack (Standard mode)	After NitroPack (Ludicrous mode)
Performance score	74	82	98
First Contentful Paint	1.8 s	1.7 s	0.7 s
Largest Contentful Paint	2.7 s	2.0 s	0.9 s
Cumulative Layout Shift	0.049	0.049	0.049
Speed Index	2.3 s	1.9 s	1.2 s

Overall, there was a significant improvement in all of the important PageSpeed performance metrics after running NitroPack, on both desktop and mobile. 

Standard mode was enough to boost speeds by a decent amount, but after switching to Ludicrous mode and tweaking the configuration settings to apply additional optimizations, performance increased significantly across the board.

GTMetrix

Next, I repeated the same text using GTMetrix. GTMetrix lets you run tests from different server locations around the world. But for the sake of brevity, and to keep things consistent, all of these tests were run from a server in Vancouver, Canada.

Before NitroPack:

Here’s what GTMetrix came back with after testing the unoptimized website page on my test site before installing NitroPack:

Again, these benchmarks weren’t too bad to begin with, but let’s see if NitroPack can make it even faster.

After NitroPack (Standard Mode)

Here are the GTMetrix results after activating NitroPack Standard mode and re-running the test:

As you can see, there were big improvements across the board.

After NitroPack (Ludicrous mode)

Here are the results after running a GTMetrix test in Ludicrous mode:

Oddly, the overall performance score actually dropped by one percentile when switching from Standard mode to Ludicrous mode. 

But if we look past that metric for a moment, it’s clear the site speed improved: The most important speed metrics like TTI, TTFB, FCP, LCP, and fully loaded time were all significantly faster compared to the Standard mode test. 

Results compared

And here are the results from GTMetrix for each test side-by-side.

	Before NitroPack	After NitroPack (Standard mode)	After NitroPack (Additional optimizations)
Performance score	93%	95%	94%
Structure score	97%	99%	100%
Time to first byte (TTFB)	754 ms	351 ms	317 ms
Time to interactive (TTI) 1.4 s	1.4 s	809 ms	438 ms
First contentful paint (FCP) 951 ms	951 ms	645 ms	381 ms
Largest contentful paint (LCP) 1.5 s	1.5 s	840 ms	546 ms
Fully loaded time 6.0s	6.0 s	1.5 s	1.2 s

Once again, the results clearly show that NitroPack did indeed boost performance significantly. 

Even on the Standard mode, NitroPack cut the time to first byte in half, and reduced the time to fully loaded from 6 seconds to just 1.5 seconds—that’s 4.5 seconds shaved off instantly.

And on Ludicrous mode, the results were even more impressive.

Undoubtedly, then, these tests seem to confirm that NitroPack does what it says on the tin and significantly improves your site’s page speed.

What features does NitroPack offer?

The main NitroPack features you need to know about are:

• Caching (smart invalidation, browser caching, automatic cache warmup)
• CDN (Global CDN, GZIP and Brotli compression, etc)
• CSS Optimization (CSS combining, above-the-fold critical CSS, deferred font loading, CSS minification, CSS compression)
• HTML optimization (HTML minification, HTML compression, advanced resource loader, DNS preconnects)
• JS optimization (Intelligent JS combining, JS minification, JS compression, deferred loading)
• Image optimization (preemptive image sizing, WEBP support, adaptive sizing, lazy loading, lossy and lossless compression)

NitroPack rolls out all of these optimization features automatically on your website as soon as you set it up. But you can change your configuration options to turn certain features off and on from your dashboard.

There are also some advanced features that come with higher tier plans such as Google Tag Manager optimization, lazy load of self-hosted videos, animated image optimization, etc.

Next, let’s take a look at the UI to see how everything works.

Getting started

To use NitroPack, you’ll first need to sign up for an account and connect it to your website.

It works seamlessly on WordPress and has some WooCommerce specific functionality.

To connect it to a WordPress site, you’ll need to install and activate the NitroPack plugin, which you can do from your WP dashboard. Just navigate to Plugins > Add New, and then search for NitroPack.