The first step of hosting and managing your own website might be choosing the best WordPress hosts with optimum speed and performance.
But after you have done choosing and your website is hosted by the absolute best in the business, you can use WordPress speed optimization plugins to help you improve the speed on your website.
When WordPress Optimization Plugin is stated, most of us think about the caching plugins, and yes caching is an important and easy way to load your website faster.
However, this plugin is not just limited to the caching plugins, here, I have included few caching plugins, lazy loading plugins, minifying plugins, and some other additional plugins that might be of some help.
Improving speed is obviously important but improving performance along with the speed is what you need to look for in a plugin. This article will give you a fair list of plugins that you can use on your WordPress website hosted by any web hosts to improve your site speed.
Why does your website load slower – what makes it load slower?
There are a bunch of things that affect your website performance. If you use the plugins listed below, most of your issues would be solved, however, if you want your website performance to be optimum then knowing what influences it and what you can do is helpful.
Size
If your website size is larger with a lot of images and videos, then the website might just take a bit longer to load because the server might take a long time to fetch the data. However, this problem can be solved with the use of the right web host and few performance optimization plugins.
Web hosting
The wrong web hosting can be the thing to take your website down and work as the ultimate failure for your online business. You need a web host with quality hardware and software, and that can work with the large size of your site along with existing traffic levels. It should support your website and have features that would work best for your business.
Themes
Choosing the right theme for your website needs your attention as much as choosing the correct web host. Bloated themes seem to influence website speed and put your website at a disadvantage. So, you might need to choose a theme that is speedy, lightweight, compatible with most plugins, and pretty minimal.
Plugins
Plugins are a great way to add extra features or add-ons on your WordPress website. However, adding a number of plugins that are not a must-have can lead to a slower website. Hence, you need to add plugins on your website only if you use it and is a must-have to grow your online business.
Why do you need a fast loading website?
Fast loading website is as important as just having a website for your business. If you want your online business to experience the ultimate growth, then you have to put a lot of thought on the WordPress host you will be choosing for your website and also a lot of extensions or plugins you could use to make the site performance even better.
If your website loads faster then your website will have the highest rank in the Google Search Engine helping with your website to get clicked more by the users.
When creating an online presence for yourself, there are thousands of different websites already and you need to do everything to help your website pop faster in the search engine so that the users can get to you faster.
Best plugins to load your website faster
Here, I will be listing the best WordPress plugins that will help you load your website faster and grow your online business. All these speeds optimizing plugins are the caching plugins, minifying plugins, and many more. So you will get a great range of what you can use on your website.
WP Rocket
If you are in a search of the all-purpose and feature-packed WordPress performance optimization plugin then, WP Rocked should definitely end your search.
It is also the easiest and beginner-friendly caching plugin you can find in the bunch. Along with caching, the plugin also offers tons of other performance optimization features. The users can instantly cache their WordPress website in just one click.
As soon as you activate the plugin, it automatically turns on recommended performance optimization settings like gzip, page caching, and browser caching.
You can also get a few different features to help with further optimization such as lazy loading image, minifying, CDN support, DNS pre-fetching, and many more.
Key features
- User-friendly interface
- Minification
- Combine files
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
- Heartbeat API control
- Lazy loading
- CDN integrations
- Database optimization
- Cloudflare integration
- Price: $49
Perfmatters
Perfmatters is the plugin you could add on your WordPress website if you need something else with your caching plugin on top.
As Perfmatters works in a different way than most of the other plugins in this list, it could be an add-on to help your further optimize your WordPress website.
Every WordPress website has the most unnecessary settings enabled and Perfmatters help you with disabling the unnecessary settings.
This is something not many WordPress plugins consider and could be a great help to enhance the performance. The major thing that can slow down your website is not needed HTTP requests. This plugin has a powerful script manager to disable these script on a per-page basis.
Key features
- Works with your existing caching plugin
- REST API control
- Heartbeat control
- Disable WordPress options that are slowing your site down
- Lightweight plugin
- DNS prefetching
- Disable scripts on per page/post basis
- Disable Heartbeat API
- Lazy load images
- Host analytics locally
- Preconnect
- Price: $24.95 per single site
WP Super Cache
One of the most popular plugin, when you think of a WordPress caching plugins, is the WP Super Cache. It is established by Automattic, which also established WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce and is highly recommended by most of the WordPress users.
The charm of WP Super Cache is its simplicity and its extremely easy to use user-interface. This plugin includes all the recommended features to cache your website and optimize it.
The caching features include browser caching, gzip compression, content caching, advanced-cache preload, and many more. You can connect to the CDN or Content Delivering Network of your choice and preload the content into the cache memory. You can take advantage of comprehensive settings with a separate tab for easy setup making your work even easier.
Key features
- Multiple caching types
- Static HTML files
- Cache preload
- CDN support
- Price: Free
WP Super Minify
If your website is large in size and bloated resulting in slowing down your website, then WP Super Minify might work wonders for you. This plugin works with the files of your website, that is, Js, HTML, and CSS.
The plugin minimizes the files so that they can be compressed and offered to the visitors with a lightweight and fast loading website. However, one downfall of this plugin might be that these types of plugins might be conflicted with other plugins or themes and data can be lost.
Hence, if you are thinking of using these types of plugins then backing up your website might be the first thing you should do before anything.
On the bright side, you can choose specific files to compress and disable the files you do not want to compress that would help during conflicts as well.
Key features
- Minifies JavaScript, CSS and HTML
- Option to disable compression of CSS/JavaScript
- Extremely straight forward and easy to use.
- Price: Free
W3 Total Cache
If you are someone who is familiar with caching or any other plugins and are in search of the plugins that give you maximum control over your WordPress website, then W3 Total Cache is just the one for you.
However, if you are a beginner then I highly recommend you stay away from this plugin. It is the most popular and highest rated WordPress plugin at WordPress.org and is also the most feature-rich plugin.
The huge array of options and tons of caching as well as minifying features are included in this plugin. You will get almost everything that is required for caching and enhancing your site speed.
It can also help you with connecting to the CDN of your choice and minification as well. Cloudflare CDN with others is also supported by this plugin.
Key features
- Page caching
- Fragment caching
- Browser caching
- Database caching
- Object caching
- Minifying
- Price: free
Final Verdict
If your website is lagging resulting in slow site speed and fewer visitors on your website, then optimizing your site using these plugins might be your first priority.
However, most of these plugins are different and do different things, recommending one plugin might not be the right thing to do.
Hence, what you need to do is choose the right plugin as per your requirements and the optimum optimization technique for your website.