If your site feels slower right after enabling Infinite Uploads and completing the initial sync, don’t panic. In most cases this is temporary, and the cause is almost always one of three things: stale caches, a CDN that hasn’t warmed up yet, or a caching plugin that’s fighting with the new media URLs. All three are fixable.
Why This Happens
When you enable Infinite Uploads, the plugin rewrites all of your media URLs on the fly. Instead of serving images and files from your local server (like yoursite.com/wp-content/uploads/), they now load from the Infinite Uploads CDN. This is a good thing for performance long-term, but it creates a short-term hiccup: every cached version of your site, from your browser to your caching plugin to our CDN, still has the old URLs stored.
Until those caches get cleared and rebuilt, your visitors may be hitting a mix of old cached pages (which point to your local server), uncached CDN requests (which go all the way to the origin storage on first load), and conflicting rules from caching plugins. That combination can make the site feel slower than before.
Step 1: Clear ALL of Your Caches
This is the most common fix. You need to clear every layer of caching on your site, not just one.
Browser cache. Hard refresh your browser (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) or clear your browser cache entirely. Your browser is likely still serving locally cached pages with the old media URLs baked in.
WordPress caching plugin. If you use WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, or any other caching plugin, purge the entire cache. Partial purges won’t cut it here. Every cached page and asset needs to be regenerated with the new CDN URLs.
Page builder cache. Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, and other page builders maintain their own CSS and asset caches. Regenerate CSS files in your page builder’s settings. In Elementor, that’s under Elementor > Tools > Regenerate CSS & Data. In Divi, clear the Static CSS File Generation cache.
Server-level cache. Some hosts (SiteGround, Cloudways, Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel) have their own server-side caching layers separate from any plugin. Purge these from your hosting control panel. This step is easy to miss because it’s not inside WordPress.
Cloudflare or external CDN/proxy. If you’re using Cloudflare or another CDN in front of your site, purge that cache too. Cloudflare in particular caches HTML and static assets aggressively, and those cached pages will still contain your old media URLs until you purge.
Step 2: Give the CDN 1–2 Hours to Warm Up
This is normal and expected. After a fresh sync, the Infinite Uploads CDN has your files in origin storage but hasn’t cached them at the edge yet. Our CDN serves files from 45+ edge locations around the world, but each edge location only caches a file after a visitor from that region requests it for the first time.
The first request for each file from each edge location goes all the way to the origin. That’s slower than a cached hit. After that first request, the file gets cached at the edge with a max-age of 1 year (the default INFINITE_UPLOADS_HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL value), so every subsequent request for that file from that region is fast.
Think of it like opening a new store with an empty warehouse. The first time a customer asks for something, you have to go to the back to get it. After that, it’s right on the shelf. Within 1–2 hours of normal traffic, the most-requested files will be cached at the edge locations your visitors actually use, and performance will be noticeably better.
Step 3: Check for Caching or Optimization Plugin Conflicts
Some caching and image optimization plugins can conflict with how Infinite Uploads rewrites URLs. The plugin uses an output buffer to find and replace your local upload URLs with the CDN URL in the rendered HTML. If another plugin is also modifying the same output buffer, or is trying to optimize images at a local path that no longer exists, things can slow down or break.
Image optimization plugins. Plugins like Smush, ShortPixel, or Imagify that compress images on the server may try to access files locally after they’ve been offloaded. Version 3.1.2 added compatibility fixes for Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer specifically. Make sure both Infinite Uploads and your optimization plugin are updated to the latest version.
Lazy loading conflicts. If your lazy loading plugin rewrites image src attributes to placeholder values before Infinite Uploads can rewrite them, the CDN URLs may not get applied correctly. Try temporarily disabling lazy loading to see if it’s the cause.
CSS/JS minification. Minification plugins that combine and cache stylesheets may embed old local URLs in their cached CSS bundles. Purging and regenerating the minified files after enabling Infinite Uploads should fix this.
For a list of known issues, see Plugins That Don’t Work Well With Infinite Uploads.
Step 4: Check Your Server Resources
The URL rewriting that Infinite Uploads does on each page load (via PHP output buffer) adds a small amount of processing overhead. On a well-configured server this is negligible, but on an underpowered shared hosting plan it can add up.
Make sure your server has at least 256 MB of PHP memory and a max_execution_time of 120 seconds or more. You can set these in your wp-config.php file:
define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M' );If your server is chronically underpowered, the performance improvement from offloading media to the CDN will more than offset the rewriting cost. The bottleneck in that case was always the server, not Infinite Uploads.
Step 5: Verify It’s Actually Slower (Not Just Perceived)
Sometimes the site isn’t actually slower. Your browser cache was keeping everything instant, and now that you’ve cleared it, you’re seeing real uncached load times for the first time.
Run a before/after test with a tool like GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, or WebPageTest. Test from a location close to your visitors, and run the test 2–3 times to let the CDN cache warm up. Compare the results against a test from before you enabled Infinite Uploads. In most cases the CDN-served version will be faster on the second and third runs, which represents what your actual visitors experience.
Pay attention to the waterfall. If media files load quickly from the CDN domain but the HTML document itself is slow, the issue is with your server or caching setup, not Infinite Uploads.
Still Slower After All of This?
If you’ve cleared every cache, waited for the CDN to warm up, checked for plugin conflicts, and confirmed with a speed test tool that performance is worse, open a support ticket. Include your GTmetrix or PageSpeed results and let us know which caching/optimization plugins you’re running. We’ll sort it out.