Must Have Plugins for Optimizing Speed of a WordPress Website
There will always be a debate regarding who is the fastest man alive? Is it the Flash or Superman? But there is one thing that is above any debate. The website needs to be fast and speedy, and there is no question or doubt about that.
Research indicates that 1 in 4 visitors will leave your website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. And once they find your website is like that sloth from Zootpoia, they will not return to your website in the near future.
Thus, it is important to understand the necessity of a fast and speedy website and take action accordingly.
There are many ways to ensure the speed and loading time of your website is increased. If you have a website already, you might want to check the current loading time of your website.
In order to do that, you can use the Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get a clear idea on how your website is doing in terms of speed. Even if you score well, there is no harm in knowing more right? And if you see the result is not satisfactory, we hope the following write up will come to your good use.
In the following, we will discuss many paid as well as free plugins that will be helpful for you to ensure your website is loading faster. A good blend of plugins can increase the quality of your website.
Many of the plugins we will discuss in the following might have overlapping features and of course additional perks. Based on the entire analysis you can pick and use the tools that will be beneficial for your website in the long run.
Without delay, let’s have a look at the must have plugins for optimizing speed of a WordPress website.
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the most popular and effective plugin to speed up your website. There are many perks of WP Rocket. WP Rocket comes with all the necessary features you could ask for. In addition, it has a very easy user navigation process.
Thus, it makes it easier for beginners to use WP Rocket and benefit from it. Even if you are completely unaware of coding and other technical issues, have no fear because WP Rocket is here.
WP Rocket works in a simple and effective way. With the help of WP Rocket, you can cache your website in literally one click.
Just in case you are wondering what is cache, let us clear it out for you. Whenever a visitor comes to your website, in the back end WordPress is going to collect some database of your website.
In addition, WordPress will complete several other steps one after another and then finally show the web page to the user.
In between the journey WordPress is making, your website gets slow and users start to lose interest in your site. The function of caching gives your WordPress the ability to skip many stages and speed up the process.
Through caching, your website saves a version of your website that they immediately show to the visitor. This fastens the speed of your website by a great margin.
So, with WP Rocket, you can cache your website with one click and whenever your visitor comes to the website, they will be presented to the visitor. Along with that, features such as gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading are also built in with WP Rocket.
These features make WP Rocket a one stop solution for caching and speeding up your website.
No good things in life come for free, right? So, the WP Rocket is also not free to use. All the necessary features of the plugin come with the paid version of the plugin.
You integrate the plugin in your website and it will be ready to use. If you are wondering how to set up a paid plugin on your website, take a look here.
2. WP Smush
Next in line among the must have plugins for optimizing the speed of a WordPress website is WP Smush. This plugin optimizes the images you are using on your website. When it comes to web performance, following these best practices for image optimization can significantly boost your website’s performance. With the help of WP Smush, compressing images, optimizing and lazy loading of images are made super easy.
Smush removes the strip bulky data from your images without changing the quality of the images. You can pick individual images that you want to compress, optimize or resize. Or with the help of the “Bulk Smush” feature, you can compress 50 images at one go.
Apart from compressing images, the theme comes with the feature of resizing. You can resize the images with the help of Smush. It will save more space on your server and also will make your website look stunning. When you optimize images and compress them, it takes less time for your website to load.
Thus it increases the loading speed of your website. Smush is highly rated with even higher active installation. It is gradually becoming the go to plugin for optimizing images on your website.
If you are looking for a plugin that will help you to compress the overall size of your images without compromising the quality. This free WordPress plugin will come handy for your website.
3. LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache has all the features you need in one place. It can be regarded as the most feature rich free plugin for cache management on your website. This all in-one plugin comes with versatile features and options that you can benefit from.
LiteSpeed Cache will look after the object cache, image optimization, lazyload images, database cleaner and optimizer, pagespeed score optimization and many more.
LiteSpeed Cache is compatible with all the major plugins. WooCommerce, WPML, Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7 are all compatible with LiteSpeed Cache.
LiteSpeed Cache is one of the popular free WordPress plugins for cache. If you are looking for a WordPress plugin for fast loading, you can trust LiteSpeed Cache blindly.
LiteSpeed Cache has very positive reviews from the users. It has a very high rating and astonishing active installation. It proves the authenticity and efficiency of the plugin.
4. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the most recommended WordPress plugins that can increase the performance of your website. If you are looking for a plugin that will increase the speed of your website, W3 Total Cache can save your day. W3 Total Cache is very well known for its ability to improve the loading speed of your website. In addition to that.
W3 Total Cache also facilitates increasing the overall SEO quality of your website. It claims to increase the overall performance of your website by 10x when it is integrated completely. Moreover, with the number of 1 million+ active installations and positive reviews, W3 Total Cache seems to live up to their expectation.
Among the features of W3 Total Cachel, increasing Google page speed, browser caching, optimized progressive render, reducing page loading time, accelerated mobile pages, and many more have made the plugin one of the notable plugins.
Along with that it helps in reducing the download time from the website too. W3 Total Cache has transparent integration with major CDN’s, this ensures that your website will have better SEO ranking, visitor time on site and more conversions.
All of these features indicate that W3 Total Cache has the necessary toolkit to bring a blended value to your website to amplify the overall quality of your website in the long run.
W3 Total Cache has a huge number of active installations that vets for the efficiency of the plugin. In addition, the reviews regarding the plugin are also very positive. If you are looking for speed optimizing WordPress plugins with additional features, W3 Total Cache can be the right pick for you.
5. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is also another plugin for optimizing speed of a WordPress website. The functionality of this cache plugin is quite similar to the other plugins. With overall features of the plugin, it provides the necessary support and functionality to keep the loading speed of your website high.
Along with that, this plugin contributes in helping the Google ranking of your website. Through its many built in features, it can increase the overall performance of your website.
One of the special features of this plugin is that the admin has more control over the cache. For example, with this speed optimization plugin, the admin can remove all cached files from specific pages. Along with that the admin can delete the minified CSS and JS files from the option pages as well.
Along with that, it gives the flexibility to enable and disable cache option for mobile users and logged in users. In addition, with WP Fastest Cache, you can avail CDN support, cloudfare support and many more.
The plugin helps to optimize the performance of the website through generating static HTML files from WordPress blogs, minimizing HTML and CSS files of the website, enhancing browser caching and more.
With 1 million+ active installations we can fathom the depth of performance this simple plugin can generate. It has been in the market for a long time and has sustained due to its performance and efficiency.
It will keep on bringing value in the long run. So, it can be a good choice for you if you are looking for plugins that improve website performance.
6. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is one of the classic plugins that you can use to optimize the website. With its features, you can easily enhance the current performance of your website to a great extent. It works like other similar plugins as well.
It will show a static html version of your website content to increase the loading time of your user. It has been in the market for so long and has an enormous amount of active installations. This number of active installations is the proof of their track record and performance.
WP Super Cache comes with features such as the “Apache mod_rewrite” or similar module to ensure the maximum speed of your site. With this method, WP Super Cache tries to ensure the highest speed enhancement of your website.
Along with that, it has the second feature that functions by serving the static file to the visitors by PHP. It does not generate the same speed as the “Apache mod rewrite” method, but it can ensure an increase in the loading speed of the website.
Last but not the least, this method is used to generate the page for logged in users, users who made a comment and users who are to be displayed custom per-user data. With the combination of all these three major features and more, WP Super Cache is the plugin that can increase the speed of WordPress websites in no time.
This theme is well recommended not only because of the number of active installations, but also for the positive reviews of the users. This is very simple and easy to use but harnesses greater outcome.
7. WP Optimize
WP Optimize is one of the modern WordPress plugins that can make WordPress websites fast and efficient. The plugin comes with specific features that can increase the overall speed, performance, and agility of your website.
In the following we will shed light on how WP Optimize operates to ensure a fast and efficient WordPress website.
Firstly, WP Optimize cleans up the trash that makes the website slow. By cleaning out the trash, it creates more room for faster speed and agility of the website. In addition, it also removes the spam and drafts from the website, making it super-fast.
Secondly, WP Optimize compresses large images and displays optimized versions of the images. Thanks to their cutting edge cloud technology.
Often the use of large images renders the website very slow. WP Optimize ensures the site is fast and light by compressing the images without compromising the quality.
Thirdly, it cache your website and thus ensure your website has fast pages and posts. With all these features it makes your website very speedy and light.
With the feature richness, this plugin has the capability to become a prominent force to reckon with. It can come handy to increase the overall performance of the website in no time.
These are the must have plugins for optimizing speed of a WordPress website. You can pick the plugin that has most of the features you required. Properly integrating these plugins will amplify the overall quality, speed and lightness of your website.
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