SlimPress – Disable Unused Features, Heartbeat & XML-RPC

Description

SlimPress turns off parts of WordPress core that your site does not use – emoji scripts, XML-RPC,
the REST API for logged-out visitors, Heartbeat, comments, feeds, author and date archives,
search, revisions, image sizes, block editor extras, dashboard clutter, automatic updates,
admin emails and more – grouped by area and explained in plain language. A built-in performance test
measures what it changes on your own pages, with and without SlimPress, without changing a setting.

What makes it different:

• Every toggle is free. No pro tier, no upsells, no nag banners, no telemetry.
• „What might break” on every switch, plus a warning when an active plugin needs the thing
  you are about to switch off.
• An honest impact badge on every toggle, including „None – cleanup only”.
• A performance test that tells the truth. It loads your pages with SlimPress’s features and
  without them, in the same run, and says „within noise” when the difference is too small to
  trust – and shows what each plugin, theme and core adds to the page, with the files SlimPress
  can remove marked.

What SlimPress deliberately does not do: page caching, minification, „remove unused CSS”,
delay-JS, per-page script managers, CDN rewrites. If a feature is not „turn off something core
WordPress does”, it does not go in.

Nothing is switched off until you switch it off. Every switch is a runtime filter, so
deactivating SlimPress restores WordPress completely on the next request. SlimPress never writes to
core tables or core options.

108 switches in 13 groups

• Front-end – emoji scripts, generator tag, RSD, shortlink and REST links in the page head,
  global styles, core block CSS, Dashicons and jQuery Migrate for visitors.
• APIs & connections – XML-RPC, the REST API for logged-out visitors (with an allowlist),
  Heartbeat per location, WP-Cron on page load, oEmbed, auto-embeds, application passwords, the
  Abilities API.
• Comments – comments site-wide or per post type, pingbacks, avatars and Gravatar.
• Content & URLs – feeds, author, date and attachment pages, search.
• Revisions & autosave – revision limits, autosave interval, trash retention, plus a
  one-off „delete old revisions” button that asks first.
• Media – the extra 1536px and 2048px image copies, image sizes you choose, and Openverse
  in the media inserter.
• Block editor – welcome guide, block directory, command palette, the classic editor for
  chosen post types.
• Dashboard & admin – dashboard widgets, admin bar items, footer text, the Customizer on
  block themes.
• Updates – automatic updates for core, plugins, themes and translations.
• Emails – the admin emails WordPress sends about updates, new users and password changes.
• Security – file editing, installing from the dashboard, the front-end password meter.
• Site Health & privacy – Site Health checks and the privacy tools menus.
• WooCommerce (only shown while WooCommerce is active) – shop assets and order attribution
  scripts on non-shop pages, Analytics, the Marketing hub, remote and marketplace suggestions,
  usage tracking, background thumbnail regeneration, and how long Action Scheduler and log files
  are kept.

Each group has an on/off switch of its own, so you can pause a whole group while you look for a
problem, and put it back exactly as it was.

Presets

The Overview tab offers site-wide presets (Safe defaults, Blog, Brochure site, WooCommerce store,
Headless). A preset only ever switches things on: it shows you what it would change first,
skips anything an active plugin relies on, and leaves everything else as it is.

Built to cost nothing

A feature that is off loads no code and adds no hooks. SlimPress adds no CSS, JavaScript or
markup to your public pages, ever. With every feature off, SlimPress adds about 105 KB of memory
and no database queries to a front-end request, and the time it adds was too small to measure
(WordPress 7.1, PHP 8.4, median of 40 paired runs).

External services

The performance test tab has an optional „Run Google PageSpeed test” button. Only when you click it,
SlimPress sends your site’s homepage URL to Google’s PageSpeed Insights API
(https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v5/runPagespeed) to fetch Core Web Vitals for that
page. No other data is sent, no API key is used, and nothing is sent automatically.

This service is provided by Google: Terms of Service,
Privacy Policy.