Are you exploring the top WordPress plugins to speed up your website?
Look no further! We
have compiled a list of some of the best WordPress plugins to speed up your
website. WordPress is the most popular and used content management system to
build and maintain websites. Besides so much effort put up on the site, there
is one thing that frustrates the user, which is website speed. That’s why there
are WordPress plugins to enhance the website speed and thus user experience. If
your website doesn’t load at the speed you think, then you must opt for the
given plugins to optimize your web platform and give your customers a fantastic
experience. But before knowing the top WordPress plugins, let’s understand how
these plugins work to assist you to enhance the speed of your WordPress
website.
So, Let’s get
started!
What Do These Plugins do to Optimize the Website?
These plugins focus
on some crucial factors to make the web platforms optimized and thus reduce the
page load time. Here is a brief on some of these factors.
Caching: It is the most basic
factor to make your website quick to load. The cache is a temporary sort of
data stored for fast access. Due to this concept, WordPress can copy this to
make temporary storage for the pages once visited by the user, then use that
page every time. This will automatically enhance the performance of the
website.
Minification: This process helps
to reduce load time by erasing redundancies in HTML, CSS, and Javascript files.
Most of the given plugins opt for this factor to optimize the platforms.
CDNs: Content Delivery Network
or Content Distribution Network is a term used for the web of servers spread
across a geographical area for giving content quicker via the closest server
present there.
Lazy Loading: The whole page can
take more time to load, hence lazy loading assists to load only the needed part
of the web pages viewed by the user at that time.
Deferring Scripts: In this
process, CSS and Javascript files load last, so that the page loads faster and
is visible first to your users.
Concatenation: The combining of
various files into a single file to reduce the number of requests on the
website is Concatenation. This improves website quality and performance to a
good level.
Let’s dive in
further to learn about some top plugins!
Top WordPress Plugins to improve
your website’s speed
WP Rocket
The first plugin on
the list is to achieve incredible speed results and website optimization. It is
the most used beginner-friendly caching plugin which assists users to cache
their websites with just one click. The plugin provides you with numerous optimization
options to enhance the working of your website.
Using WP Rocket,
users can easily combine CSS and JS files, eliminate render-blocking Javascript
resources, gzip compression, lazy load images, and schedule database cleaning
automatically. The plugin is worth the use if you want to optimize your web
platform without any huddle.
Potential Features:
●
Page caching to make your web
documents super fast to boost SEO.
●
Automatic pre-loading of cache
after any changes of any of the web pages.
●
Web page compressing on the server
and decompression on the browser through gzip compression.
●
Exclusion of sensitive pages from
the cache.
●
The plugin has very good
compatibility with various themes and other plugins.
●
It assists you to make very light
files as it combines CSS and JS files of the website.
WP-Optimize
The next choice is a
very good customer-rated plugin, WP-Optimize to streamline your database and
well optimize your website. It makes the website super fast and SEO-friendly
too. One of the most popular features of the plugin is its cache engine.
It effectively
caches your website, does image compression, and purifies the database to
enhance its performance. You can easily minify and asynchronous CSS and
JavaScript. Its default minifying feature assists to do well optimization of
the web platforms.
Potential Features:
●
It is a very simple to use and mobile-friendly plugin.
●
It has a button press feature to
de-fragment MySQL tables.
●
It provides the option of
automatic weekly clean-ups.
●
CDN service to give super fast
page speed results to customers.
●
Image compression and page caching
are some important features of the plugin.
●
Option to have backups for
pre-optimization automatically.
W3 Total Cache
The next caching
plugin choice with good results and customer reviews is W3 Total Cache or W3TC.
It is a super fast plugin to quickly improve the load time of your website. It
also provides an option to integrate CDN into your website to cut off even more
seconds while loading the pages.
It awesomely improves the SEO of your website and enhances the user experience very well. It
is the only web host agnostic web performance optimization platform for
WordPress users. You can get an overall 10x improved performance for all your
WordPress sites using this plugin.
Potential Features:
●
The plugin has transparent CDN management
with theme files and a WordPress media library.
●
It has support for Secure Socket
Layer (SSL/TLS) and accelerated mobile pages.
●
You can cache minified CSS and
Javascript files in the memory.
●
It can let you save bandwidths by
around 80%.
●
It assists you to improve search
engine rankings and conversion rates to a great extent.
●
It has an option to cache website
objects like categories, tags, comments, search results, and many more.
WP Super Minify
WP Super Minify
plugin merges, caches, and minifies the CSS and the Javascript files very well
with the minify PHP framework to reduce the load time of the website. It
compacts the files to a great extent so that the website loads quickly.
The plugin is very
simple and good to use with over 10K active installations. You just have to
download it from the WordPress repository and install it. If you want to
optimize your website free of cost, then go for WP Super Minify.
Potential Features:
●
Easily compress Javascript and CSS
files to reduce the size.
●
Helps to enhance page load speed
and Google page speed.
●
Allows you to check the proper
working of the plugin to get good results.
●
WP Super Minify is open-source
software.
●
Very easy and straightforward to
use.
●
You can disable the shortening of
CSS and Javascript files.
WP Smush
WP Smush is a good
plugin for the optimization of images especially. It helps to reduce the image
size by removing unnecessary bytes from it to enhance the speed of the web
pages. Smush has the advantage of using lossless tools to compress images to
maintain the quality of the images.
It is an
award-winning image compression plugin with over 1 million downloads. You will
not notice any sort of change in the quality of the pictures after using this
plugin.
Potential Features:
●
It optimizes images with 2x speed
and quality with multi-pass lossy compression.
●
It easily strips unused data and
colors from the images via its lossless tools.
●
It has support for all standard
image formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.
●
It can be integrated with the
Smush. it API.
●
It assists you to detect incorrect
image sizes and the images that are reducing the website’s speed.
●
If there are so many images, it
has the capability to optimize 50 images at a time.
WP Super Cache
The next pick on the
list is a super-to-use and widely-known caching plugin named WP Super Cache.
With over 2 million active installations, the plugin offers you a simple
process to download and use it.
It has almost all
the required caching features that will help you to accelerate your website at
a good pace. It comprises a separate comprehensive setting part. It offers to
work in 3 caching modes- one of the expert modes which is the fastest one and
used by professionals and developers. The second one is the Simple mode and the
last is WP-Cache caching mode.
Potential Features:
●
The plugin provides support for so
many caching types like PHP and Legacy.
●
It also has support for CDN or
Content Delivery Network.
●
In case of limited space, it
automatically does the garbage collection and deletes old files.
●
It offers to do pre-loading
through which you can generate cached files for posts, tags, etc.
●
It provides an option to choose
some latest settings like browser caching, and Gzip compression. Updation of
cache etc.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters is our
next choice of a very lightweight WordPress plugin to improve the performance
of your website. Some of the best web performance geeks developed this plugin
to enhance the conversion rates and traffic to your web platform. Perfmatters
enables you to of some of the WordPress options that are of no use and slows down
the speed too.
The plugin allows
you to disable the HTTP scripts on per page basis. That means it allows you to
stop loading the code of the pages that are of no use. You can install
Perfmatters even if you are using some of the WordPress caching plugins.
Potential Features:
●
You can reduce HTTP requests to
increase the speed of your web pages.
●
The dashboard is so easy to use
with one-click toggles.
●
You have to option to get support
from an experienced team of developers.
●
Easily work with the existing
caching plugins.
●
You can disable scripts as per
page or post basis.
●
The plugin is so lightweight and
clean in coding.
NitroPack
The next pick is
NitroPack which is not just a WordPress performance improver plugin but it is a
whole speed optimization plugin. The plugin has integration with many big
platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce, Magneto, etc.
NitroPack was
basically developed for speeding up the websites without manually deciding the
speed-up factors to optimize the sites. You just have to add your web platform
and install this plugin and then select the phase or level of optimization you
want in your website.
Potential Features:
●
It has support for WordPress and
many other content management systems.
●
The plugin offers you a high cache
hit ratio with its super advanced features.
●
It allows you to do lossy and
lossless image compression and advanced lazy loading.
●
It has a default global CDN.
●
It provides support for critical
CSS, DNS prefetching, preloading, etc.
●
It has an option for HTML, JS, and
CSS minification and compression.
Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler by
KeyCDN is another powerful WordPress plugin with minimal configuration to
improve site performance and loading time. It has an option to store the
frontend’s static HTML files on the server’s disk. These static HTML files are
delivered without having any database query to do a quicker page load.
You can even set the
expiry date for the cached files and clear the site cache in case of any change
in content. The plugin is also good to use on multisite networks.
Potential Features:
●
It has support for automatic cache
clearing after a particular time period.
●
The set-up of the plugin is very
simple to do.
●
WebP and mobile support features.
●
Pre-compression support for Brotli
and Gzip.
●
You can even exclude posts from
clearing.
●
You can even get a real-time
display of cache in the WordPress dashboard.
WP Fastest Cache
The last pick on the
list is the WP Fastest Cache plugin with a keen focus on caching and
performance of the website. It is one of the highest-rated plugins on the WordPress
directory.
The platform has so
many advanced features to offer you like deletion of cached files by Admin,
minification of CSS and JS files, scheduling for deletion of files as per
availability, etc. WP Fastest Cache is so easy to set up and there is an
automatic way for modification of .htacces files.
Potential Features:
●
You can clear cache and minify CSS
in just one click.
●
It has support for CDN, SSL, and
Cloudflare.
●
After publishing the post, all the
cached files are deleted.
●
Admin can even delete minified CSS
and JS files easily from the options page.
●
You can enable or disable the
cache option for mobile devices and already logged-in users.
●
You can even block the cache for
some particular pages with shortcodes.
The Closure: Speed Up Your Website With Best Plugin
That’s all for this
blog!
We have gathered an
awesome list comprising the top 10 WordPress plugins to speed up your dream
website. If your web platform is not performing well and the visitors face load
time issues, then there are maximum chances that your business will suffer.
To enhance the
loading time of the site and to give your visitors a hassle-free experience,
you should opt for any one of the needed WordPress plugins. There are numerous
options available in the market, hence this list will help you to find the best
for you as per the given features and your requirements.
If you still have
any thoughts in mind….You can connect with us….We will be delighted to serve
you!
Hope you had a good
read!
About the Author:
Naveen Kumar is the
marketing and product head at JoomDev. He loves to convert his ideas into
reality by developing products to make your online business success with his
WordPress plugins and mobile app development services.