Web Optimizations

CorePanel can speed up a site at the web-server level, with no plugin, no build step and no change to the site’s code. The switches are per domain, so you can enable one for a site and leave the rest alone.

You will find them in the account workspace’s Optimizations section.

What is available

Optimization	What it does	Editions
WebP	Serves images as WebP to browsers that accept it, keeping the original for those that do not	All, including Personal
Early Hints	Sends a 103 Early Hints response with the page’s key assets so the browser can start fetching them while the server is still building the page	All, including Personal
Minify JS	Strips whitespace and comments from JavaScript responses	Speed Optimizer — Pro and above
Minify CSS	Same for stylesheets	Speed Optimizer — Pro and above

WebP and Early Hints are baseline features: they are part of every edition, including the free Personal edition, and are not something you upgrade for.

Three states, not two

Each switch has three states, and the difference matters:

State	Meaning
Default	No per-domain setting stored — the server’s default applies
On	Forced on for this domain, whatever the server default is
Off	Forced off for this domain, whatever the server default is

Leaving a switch on Default is not the same as turning it off: it means “follow the server”. Set it explicitly only when this domain must differ.

WebP

Modern browsers advertise WebP support; older ones do not. With this on, an image request from a browser that accepts WebP is answered with a WebP version, while everything else keeps receiving the original file. The files in your document root are untouched.

This is usually the single largest win on an image-heavy site, and it requires nothing from the application.

Early Hints

A normal page load is serial: the browser asks for the HTML, waits while the server (and PHP, and the database) build it, and only then discovers which CSS and JS it needs.

103 Early Hints breaks that wait. CorePanel learns which assets a page pulls in and, on subsequent requests, sends them as hints before the real response — so the browser fetches the stylesheet while PHP is still working.

Where Early Hints apply

Hints are emitted for responses that go through PHP-FPM or a proxied backend — the ones that actually take time to generate. A purely static file is already fast and is served without them.

Minification (Pro and above)

Minify JS and Minify CSS shrink those responses on the way out. They are part of the Speed Optimizer feature set of the Pro edition, alongside dynamic caching.

Minification is generally safe, but it is a transformation of what your application returns. If a site depends on the exact bytes of its scripts — an integrity hash, an inline source map — verify after enabling.

A sensible order to enable things

1. WebP — biggest win, lowest risk, free.
2. Early Hints — helps every dynamic page, free.
3. Minify CSS, then Minify JS — check the site after each.

Measure before and after on a real page rather than trusting a single synthetic score; the Web Traffic graphs show what your server is actually serving.