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Aero V2 10 1 Optimization Screen
Aero is the performance plugin that ships on every WP Stratos site, and it’s built from eight separate modules, each one owning a different part of the request lifecycle. A single request touches several of them on its way from the moment a bot or visitor hits your server to the moment the last byte of CSS reaches their browser. If you’ve used a typical “all in one speed plugin” before, drop your assumptions. Aero was built specifically for WP Stratos’s Batcache and Edge Cache stack, and several of its screens exist purely to keep those layers coherent with each other. Here’s the map before you go module by module.

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The eight screens

Cache

Page-level Batcache: what triggers a purge automatically, per-page flushing, and the mu-plugin behaviors that shape how Batcache stores your pages.

Edge Cache

Enable, purge, and disable WP Stratos’s Edge Cache CDN layer. Includes Defensive Mode for traffic spikes or attacks.

Cache Warmer

Rebuilds cache in the background right after a flush, so real visitors never pay the “first hit after purge” cost. Reads your sitemap and llms.txt.

Purge Order & Schedule

Sets the order caches flush in (Aero, Batcache, Edge) and puts a WP-Cron safety net under the whole system.

Optimization

Minification, JS deferral, async CSS, font self-hosting, and the WordPress-bloat cleanup that most Core Web Vitals advice actually points at.

Images

Local WebP and AVIF conversion for your whole media library, plus custom folders, media replacement, and three delivery modes.

Experimental

Guest Mode and cache isolation. Powerful, situational, and worth reading closely before you touch it.

Debug

A single copy-paste diagnostic report covering every module, for support tickets and your own sanity checks.

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What actually happens on a page load

It helps to picture the pipeline instead of memorizing eight menu names.
1

Edge Cache serves the response, if it's warm

WP Stratos’s global edge nodes hold a copy of the page closest to the visitor. If it’s there, nothing else in this list runs. This is the fastest possible outcome and the one Cache Warmer works hardest to guarantee.
2

Batcache serves the response, if Edge missed

Batcache holds full-page HTML in the object cache, keyed by URL and cookie state. A hit here skips PHP and the database entirely.
3

WordPress renders the page

On a miss, WordPress builds the page as normal: theme, plugins, database queries, the works. This is the expensive path, and it’s exactly what caching exists to avoid repeating.
4

Aero rewrites the output before it's sent

While the page streams out, Aero swaps in minified CSS/JS, applies font optimizations, defers non-critical scripts, and (if enabled) rewrites images to WebP/AVIF markup. This step runs on every uncached render.
5

Batcache and Edge store the result

The rewritten page gets cached at both layers so the next visitor lands back at step 1.
Two things follow directly from this pipeline, and they explain most of what you’ll read on the other pages: Caching and optimization are separate jobs. A page can be perfectly minified and still slow, because nothing is caching it. A page can be cached instantly and still fail PageSpeed, because nothing is minifying it. Turning on every checkbox on one screen and ignoring the others is the most common way people under-use Aero. Multiple cache layers mean multiple things to purge. Clearing Batcache doesn’t touch Edge Cache, and clearing Aero’s minified file cache doesn’t touch either. This is why Purge & Schedule exists as its own screen instead of a single “clear everything” button buried somewhere. If a change still isn’t showing after a full flush, Cache Issues walks through the rest of the checklist.

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Where to start

Aero ships with sane defaults. Minification, HTML compression, JS deferral, LCP preloading, and font optimization are all on from install. For most sites, the highest-leverage next step isn’t flipping more switches, it’s making sure the cache side is actually keeping up with the optimization side:
  1. Confirm your purge order matches how your cache layers are actually stacked.
  2. Turn on the Cache Warmer so flushes don’t leave your homepage cold for the next visitor.
  3. Only reach for Experimental features if the first two steps don’t get you where you need to be. Guest Mode solves a narrow problem and isn’t free.
Aero is pre-installed and managed as part of WP Stratos hosting. If you deactivate it, it reactivates automatically on the next plugin update cycle. See Plugin Reactivation if you need to disable specific features instead of the whole plugin.

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A note on where the wins actually come from

Every screen in Aero eventually touches PageSpeed Insights or Core Web Vitals in some way. But the biggest, most durable ranking and UX lever remains your content and your site’s technical crawlability, and shaving another 200ms off Time to Interactive won’t change that. Google’s own generative AI search guidance says as much directly: speed and technical cleanliness support visibility, they don’t substitute for having something useful on the page. Aero removes speed as a variable so your content gets judged on its own merits instead of on a slow server.
Last modified on August 23, 2026