We tend to gravitate towards fast-loading websites because anything that takes time loses our attention. Besides using a great WordPress hosting service, you could use some WordPress plugins which can warrant faster loading speed for your website. Here is our list of best WordPress plugin for this purpose.
WP Fastest Cache
Everyone likes the easy setup process of this plugin. Once installed, you activate it and go through the settings so that it can begin its work. The free version allows you to minify CSS and HTML and remove all cache or minified CSS in just one click. You can also set up which posts and pages should be included and which ones to be excluded from the actions taken by the plugin.
In an attempt to keep your website light, if you would like to set up an expiration time for your posts or pages or for URL strings then WP Fastest Cache will make this possible too. If you are looking for more features, then a paid version of this plugin is also available to extend its functionalities.
W3 Total Cache
The good thing about this plugin is that it takes speedy performance a step further by offering not just a plugin but an entire framework. There are lots of features which include CDN support and CloudFlare support. Different types of caching methods are also available which include object and database caching.
It also support minifying and provides CDN integration. Websites like mashable.com, ilovetypography.com, and makeuseof.com depend on this plugin for faster website performance. Setting this up may, however, require some support if you are a beginner and do not have adequate technical knowledge.
WP Rocket – $39
While most people end up slanting towards W3 Total Cache because it is free, those who are looking for a robust and user-friendly plugin will find WP Rocket to be a better choice. The only thing is that this is a paid plugin.
It offers quality and comes with a range of features which include page and browser caching, GZIP compression, minification as well as CDN capabilities. At $39, it may sound pricey, but it comes with adequate support and good features making it worth the price you pay.
It so happens that WordPress has the habit of storing everything including pages, posts, revisions made to posts, and information related to different plugins. Since anything that takes up space reduces the overall speed of your website, you will find it helpful to optimize your database and de-clutter your website. Plugins that optimize the database can be good for users who are hoping to reduce loading time for their website.
WP-Optimize
Clean and neat database is really needed to offer a good page speed. So, database cleaning is one of the important tasks to maintain good speed. By default WordPress stores each and every post, page, comment, revision, trash data and information from other plugins thus the database gets loaded with stuff and the more stuff will start storing there, your website will be blogged down.
WP Optimize is used for this purpose that works to de-clutter the database by removing all the unwanted stuff like spam content, trash items, stale revisions etc. with all these it also tells about the size of your database and how much space is possible to save with this plugin. Again you should not be an expert in using this plugin rather everything can be done from the WordPress dashboard which is easily done by the novice also.
WP Database Optimizer
Another plugin that helps you optimize your database is the WP Database Optimizer. It eradicates all unwanted and unused files that are sitting around the website pulling down its overall performance.
Images are a prime factor for impacting loading speeds of a website. This is why there are a number of plugins which are dedicated to improving websites speeds by targeting the images on the website. If you use lots of images on your WoordPress site then you may find the following plugins to be extremely helpful in improving loading speeds.
Plugin Organizer
WordPress site speed optimization plugins are really helpful but you must have used other plugins as well in your website for some other job and what is again worth saying is too many of plugins will actually slow down the page. But the solution is not to stop uses of plugins rather to ensure that a particular plugin is not being loaded in every page as by default each plugin is loaded in every page thus affect the page speed.
Plugin organizer is one such helpful plugin to be used in this purpose that allow to select the only plugin to be loaded in each page through a check box system and thus reduce the overall page loading time.
Lazy Load
This plugin does not load images, thumbnails, Gravatar images or any other image till the time it is about to become visible in the user’s browser or viewpoint. A website that weighs down because of many images will find lazy load to be a helpful option.
Lazy loading means that only specific elements are loaded with the website and the rest is loaded only when it is needed.
Digg Digg
Social media buttons at the web page has been proved very effective and according to a study it enhances the chances of getting a post shared by almost 50%. Also developing readership through social media is not a bad idea at all. But at the same time it is to mention that social media buttons are the one that takes longest time to load. The reason is different HTTP query is to be requested for each button, so if you are attaching 6 buttons, 3 at the top and 3 at the bottom, 6 http queries are to be requested for that which will normally slow down the page speed.
But Digg Digg is a lazy load social media plugin that can come to your rescue in this case. It displays fake social media button and they are only loaded when the visitors hover over them. So, definitely this WordPress site speed optimization plugin can bring great difference in performance of your website.
EWWW Image Optimizer
It leverages a suite of tools to optimize images and reduce their file size by picking the file format which will help in producing the smallest image size. A lot of users find it to be the best WordPress speed plugin when it comes to optimizing images because it uses the lossless method of optimizing images. It means that the image does not lose its original quality when they are optimized.
Jetpack’s Photon
Jetpack comes pre-installed so all you need to do is activate it and go through its settings to make the most of this plugin. Photon is a feature included in the Jetpack plugin which can make a notable difference in image loading for your website.
This feature helps in storing all your images in the global WordPress.com cloud that helps people from anywhere in the world easily access your website without facing any delay in loading speeds.
And since we are discussing the use of plugins to make your website perform speedily, why not discuss plugins which are responsible for negatively impacting the speed of your website? Fortunately, there is a plugin which caters to this problem too:
P3 Profiler
Created by GoDaddy, this is the best WordPress speed plugin when it comes to identifying plugins which may be slowing down the performance of your website. It is very clean and accurate in the work it is supposed to do. You will see a precise breakdown of the different loading times of the plugins helping you find out which one is pulling down the speed of your website.
It also shows details of the impact your theme has on the loading time of the website.
WP Smush.It
Another best plugin to optimize the size of images in your website to ensure website speed is not affected at all. Website needs to be visually attractive to lure visitors but too many and large images takes huge time to get loaded as they carry unnecessary extra file size even though they are not needed at all. There are always ways to crop the image size in WordPress but the physical size still pose an issue and for this the best solution is to compress the image.
Using WP Smush.It is a very good solution to this as this plugin remove the unused color from indexed images and also strip away the metadata from JPEGs thus result in smaller image size and offer quick load time without any effect on the actual image quality.
Over to you
These are the best WordPress speed plugins that we have come across during our endless trials and errors with the use of different plugins to improve website performance. Do you know of other plugins which have helped you tackle speed problems more effectively? Let us know.