WP Admin Speedboost – a free, open-source WordPress plugin I built to make wp-admin faster and quieter: 17 switchable modules plus one-click database cleanup, downloadable straight from GitHub.
WP Admin Speedboost is a free WordPress plugin I designed, built and maintain. It bundles 17 small admin optimisations into one settings page, each with its own on/off switch, plus a one-click database cleanup. Nothing is hidden and it contacts no external service.
Why I built it
On the WordPress sites I build and maintain, the same handful of fixes kept coming back: heartbeat requests hammering admin-ajax, dashboard widgets firing HTTP calls on every load, vendor promo banners, emoji scripts nobody uses, an exposed wp-login.php. Each one normally means another plugin. Admin Speedboost puts them in one lightweight plugin I can install on every site and switch per site.
What it does
- Performance: heartbeat throttle (autosave and post locking kept), emoji and oEmbed removal, jQuery Migrate off on the front end, lazy-loaded Gravatars.
- Less admin noise: dashboard widget cleanup, Site Health probe prune, admin bar cleanup, vendor promo notices hidden while errors and the Updates screen stay intact.
- Security & access: REST API user lockdown for anonymous requests, XML-RPC off, optional hide login URL, optional disable application passwords.
- Editing & login: classic editor, Duplicate Page & Post, and a custom split-screen login page with your logo and a splash image.
- Database cleanup: revisions, expired transients and orphaned meta, run over AJAX with a confirm step and a lock so two tabs cannot run it at once.
- Server recommendations: suggested wp-config.php constants and live OPcache/JIT status with php.ini values to copy.
How it is built
- Modular PHP: every optimisation is its own module that can be switched off without side effects.
- Conflict detection: modules stand down with a notice if a plugin doing the same job (WPS Hide Login, Yoast Duplicate Post, Classic Editor) is active.
- Updates from GitHub releases, shown on the normal Plugins screen with a Check for updates link.
- Multisite-aware uninstall that removes every option and transient it created.
- Developer filters for heartbeat screens, removed widgets, cleanup batch size, duplicate post types and more.
- Requires WordPress 5.6+ and PHP 7.4+, tested up to WordPress 7.1. GPL-2.0-or-later.
Install
Download the zip from the latest GitHub release (currently wp-admin-speedboost-1.7.4.zip), then go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin, activate it and open Settings > Admin Speedboost. Back up your database before running the cleanup: it permanently deletes data.
Need something custom?
I build custom WordPress plugins and speed up slow wp-admin dashboards for businesses in Malaysia. Tell me about your site.
