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WP-PJAX icon
Possibly abandoned Tested up to 3.5.2

WP-PJAX

Makes WordPress a lot faster using PJAX (PushState + AJAX) for loading content.

Active installs10+10+ tier
Downloads · 30d41▼ -19.6% vs prev. 30d
Rating4/54 reviews
Health score27/100At risk
All-time downloads5.5KSince Mar 2013
Support resolved—No recent threads
RequiresWP 3.5PHP any
Downloads · 7d8• 0% week over week
Our verdict

Consider an alternative

WP-PJAX shows warning signs in 2026 — compare the alternatives below before installing. It runs on 10+ sites, is rated 4/5 and was last updated 14 years ago, and scores 27/100 on our health check.

  • Small user base (10+ active installs)
  • Very few reviews so far
  • No update in 13 years
  • Only tested up to WordPress 3.5 (latest is 7.1)

How does it stack up?

Side-by-side on installs, updates, ratings & support

Daily downloads

369Jul 20Sep 2Oct 17
Yesterday2
Daily average (1y)1
Peak day12Sep 10, 2026
Last 12 months434

Download spikes usually follow a new release — each site that auto-updates counts as a download.

Rankings

Where WP-PJAX stands today

WordPress.org search rankings

Live position in the plugin search, top 100
KeywordPositionCompeting pluginsCategory
cache >100 9,396 Best cache plugins →
optimization >100 5,452 Best optimization plugins →
performance >100 10,000 Best performance plugins →
pjax #11 11 Best pjax plugins →
speed >100 5,925 Best speed plugins →

Version adoption

Share of active sites per release.

  • 0.0100.0%

Rating breakdown

★★★★★★★★★★ 4 from 4 reviews

  • 5★75.0%
  • 4★0.00%
  • 3★0.00%
  • 2★0.00%
  • 1★25.0%

About WP-PJAX

From the official readme · v0.0.4.1

Description

THIS PLUGIN IS STILL EXPERIMENTAL – USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

The plugin is under development. Please try it and contact me if you encounter any bugs or have any questions or suggestions. If you want to help me develop this further send a pull request on GitHub.
The plugin is not ready for production yet, but I will soon release version 0.1 that will be production ready.

WP-PJAX – PJAX for WordPress Plugin.

Makes your site faster and saves you a lot of bandwidth and CPU power by making your WordPress site PJAX powered!

What is PJAX?

PJAX is a technique that uses AJAX and PushState to deliver a faster browsing experience by only loading and updating parts of the page HTML each page load. PushState makes it possible to add real permalinks, page titles, and a working back button so that your visitors won’t be able to tell the difference between PJAX page load and ordinary full page loads, except for the increased speed of course :).

Why PJAX?

It makes your site significantly faster in most cases and saves you both processing power and bandwidth!

Features

  • Speeds up any website. With the built in page cache enabled you can expect 10-50+% faster page loads.
  • Supports 4 Levels of application cache! This plugin uses browser cache and page cache. It is also enabling reverse proxy(i.e. Varnish) cache by (optionally) striping sessions and cookies and it works very well with underlaying object and database cache using third party cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache (recommended).
  • Works well with W3 Total Cache.
  • Configurable. No need to dig into the code. You will still need basic knowledge about HTML and how WordPress works to make this plugin reach it’s full potential.
  • Live notices with a report for every page load (Load time, page cache hit or miss, Reverse proxy/Varnish cache miss or hit etc – See screenshot). This is great for debugging and testing and is of course only visible for admins.
  • Only a few changes in your theme and you are ready to go. Should not take more than 5 minutes and requires only basic knowledge.

Browser support

PJAX is not supported in Internet Explorer 9 and earlier(IE 10+ supports this), but the plugin handles this gracefully by falling back on regular page loads for unsupported browsers. Details on browser support

Development

All development of this plugin occurs on GitHub. Please help me develop this by forking and sending pull requests.

Planned features / To-Do

  • Better handling of menu active classes. Will probably use regex for this. Support for marking parent pages active would be nice but I don’t know any good ways to accomplish that.
  • Better control over exceptions for when to disable PJAX, when you use Page cache, and when and what cookies and sessions that should be striped. Regex support will be added.
  • Refresh cache on publish/update.
  • Separate loading of sidebars with separate cache.
  • Page loading notice / icon. This should also be customizable with css, text(localizable) and it should be possible to upload your own icon.
  • Page cache prefetch needs to be revisited. WP-Cron is a bit tricky and its hard to handle timeouts gracefully and reliably cross different environments.
  • Remove all debug code and general code cleanup. This will be finished before the 0.1 release.
  • Add an optional menu to the admin bar for clearing cache(all and current page).
  • Optimize execution flow for better performance
  • Maybe: Better way to generate the configurable javascript. I think of two options for this, ether use wp_localize_script to inject variables into javascript or to generate a javascript with PHP file when settings are saved.

Known issues

  • The PJAX toggle checkbox does not work. $.pjax.disable() does not seam to work as it should. Maybe I need to set a cookie with AJAX to set this for the current user and then handle it on the server side.

Development

All development of this plugin occurs on GitHub. Please help me develop this by forking and sending plull requests.

Installation

The plugin needs to control whether the header and footer should fire or not for every request. Therefore you need to make some small changes in your theme for this plugin to work properly. This what you need to do:

  1. Header. Put this line of code in the top of every header file(any header*.php file) in your theme(before any code or output)

  2. Footer. Put this line of code in the top of every footer file(any footer*.php file) in your theme(before any code or output)

  3. Sidebar. Put this line of code in the top of every sidebar file(any sidebar*.php file) in your theme(before any code or output). This is currently not used, but it will probably be used in later versions. So for safe upgrades in the future, I recommend that you do this.

  4. Install and activate the plugin as usual.

  5. Configure the plugin and enable it. The configuration page can be found under ‘WP-PJAX’ in the settings menu in WP-Admin. Basic instructions on how to configure is provided on the configuration page.

  6. That should be it! I Hope you will enjoy the plugin and the performance boost!

Changelog

= 0.0.4.1=
* Added screenshots to Assets folder.
* Fixed bug with the sitemap URL in the default settings.

= 0.0.4=
* Code clean up. Some code removed and some debug code commented.
* URL parsing fix for finding element to add active class.

0.0.3

  • Added default settings for easier first-time configurations (Not super sexy, but it works).

0.0.2

  • Hack to make sure this plugin runs first for even better performance on cache hits(No need to touch the other plugins if we have a cached page).

0.0.1

  • The first version!
  • This is still experimental and I can’t give you any guarantees.

Full changelog on WordPress.org →

Screenshots

The plugin is activated with the loading notices to the right. Check out the load times!
The plugin is activated with the loading notices to the right. Check out the load times!
Admin page.
Admin page.

For developers

Is this your plugin? Show off the numbers.

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Active installs badge Rating badge Health score badge

Best WP-PJAX alternatives

All cache plugins →
Alternatives
Rank Plugin Active installs Rating Updated Health
1 WP Super Cache WP Super Cache A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. by Automattic 1M+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 (1.3K) 2 weeks ago 91
2 WP Fastest Cache – WordPress Cache Plugin WP Fastest Cache – WordPress Cache Plugin The simplest and fastest WP Cache system by Emre Vona 1M+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 (4.2K) 1 week ago 88
3 WP-Optimize – Cache, Compress images, Minify & Clean database to boost page speed & performance WP-Optimize Get caching and more with this powerful cache plugin. Cache, optimize images, clean your… by David Anderson / Team Updraft 1M+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 (2.6K) 4 weeks ago 89
4 SpeedyCache – Cache, Optimization, Performance SpeedyCache – Cache, Optimization, Performance SpeedyCache is a WordPress cache plugin that helps you improve performance of your… by Softaculous 500K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 (30) 1 week ago 90
5 Breeze Cache Breeze Cache Breeze is a caching plugin developed by Cloudways. Breeze uses advance caching systems to… by Cloudways 300K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 3.6 (132) 5 days ago 82
6 OMGF | GDPR/DSGVO Compliant, Faster Google Fonts. Easy. OMGF | GDPR/DSGVO Compliant, Faster Google Fonts. Easy. The original Google Fonts self-hosting plugin. Automagically caches your fonts locally — no… by Daan van den Bergh 300K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 (213) 6 days ago 81
7 Jetpack Boost – Website Speed, Performance and Critical CSS Jetpack Boost – Website Speed, Performance and Critical CSS Speed up your WordPress site with one-click optimizations like Page Cache, Critical CSS… by Automattic 200K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 (610) 1 week ago 95
8 Aruba HiSpeed Cache Aruba HiSpeed Cache Aruba HiSpeed Cache interfaces directly with an Aruba hosting platform's HiSpeed Cache… by Aruba.it Dev 100K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 3 (10) 4 weeks ago 83
9 Cache Enabler Cache Enabler A lightweight caching plugin for WordPress that makes your website faster by generating… by KeyCDN 100K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 (139) 3 weeks ago 78
10 NitroPack – Performance, Page Speed & Cache Plugin for Core Web Vitals, CDN & Image Optimization NitroPack Boost site speed and performance with an all-in-one cache and speed optimization plugin… by NitroPack 90K+ ★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 (311) 3 weeks ago 78

FAQ

WP-PJAX: quick answers

Straight answers, pulled from live WordPress.org data.

Live data from WordPress.org · checked Oct 18, 2026

Is WP-PJAX free?

Yes. WP-PJAX is free to download and use from the official WordPress.org plugin directory.

Is WP-PJAX safe to use in 2026?

WP-PJAX shows warning signs in 2026 — compare the alternatives below before installing. It runs on 10+ sites, is rated 4/5 and was last updated 14 years ago, and scores 27/100 on our health check.

How many websites use WP-PJAX?

WP-PJAX is active on 10+ WordPress websites and has been downloaded 5,466 times since it launched in March 2013. It was downloaded 41 times in the last 30 days.

Does WP-PJAX work with WordPress 7.1?

WP-PJAX is officially tested up to WordPress 3.5.2, while the latest release is 7.1.3. It may still work, but try it on a staging site first.

When was WP-PJAX last updated?

The latest version, 0.0.4.1, was released on April 2, 2013 (14 years ago).

Who makes WP-PJAX?

WP-PJAX is developed and maintained by Peter Elmered.

What are the best alternatives to WP-PJAX?

The most popular alternatives to WP-PJAX are WP Super Cache (1M+ installs), WP Fastest Cache (1M+ installs) and WP-Optimize (1M+ installs).

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