The recent Google update – Core Web Vitals – has set a group of factors that Google considers important for the overall user experience, with page speed being one of the top factors that can influence your site’s ranking on SERPs. If your website’s speed is sluggish, then it is important to optimise it for better lead generation and conversion. To this end, here are a few WordPress plugins that can help improve your site’s performance and load time. Check it out!
A. Why Speed Up Your WordPress Website?
Here are a few statistics that highlight the importance of improving your site’s speed.
- If your page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, it can increase the bounce rate by 32%. (Think with Google)
- Your conversion rate can drop by 7% if there is a 100-millisecond delay in load time. (Unbounce)
- It is estimated that a one-second delay in load time can decrease customer satisfaction by 16%. (Hosting Tribunal)
- 40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. (Neil Patel)
- 79% of online shoppers stated that they are less likely to buy from the same site if they have a dissatisfying experience. (Akamai)
B. How to Test Your WordPress Load and Page Speed?
How fast is your WordPress website? Here are some free tools that’ll help you determine your site’s page speed and load time.
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- PageSpeed Insight: This is a free tool offered by Google that provides website speed performance reports for both mobile and desktop. It also offers insights into errors that need to be fixed for speeding up a WordPress website.
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- GTMetrix: This tool lets you test and monitor your page’s performance. It offers features like page speed score, total page size and information on HTTP request loads on your site. It also lets you test your web page in different countries and tracks your site’s performance over time.
- Pingdom Tools: This tool analyzes your site’s load speed and provides helpful suggestions on how to fix bottlenecks to increase website speed.
C. WordPress Plugins That Will Help Speed Up Your Site
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best premium WordPress speed optimisation plugins that you can find on the internet right now. Apart from the caching functionality, it includes a host of features such as database optimisation, image lazy loading and delay Javascript execution time. It has a user-friendly interface, so even a novice can use this plugin with ease. Plus, it supports third-party apps integration such as Google Analytics, CDN integrations, etc.
2. WP Smush.it
One of the reasons why your website speed may be sluggish is because of heavy and unoptimised media files. To make your WordPress site faster, you need to optimise your images. The WP Smush.it plugin can help, as it specializes in image optimisation and compression. This award-winning plugin can compress images without diminishing their quality. It also comes with the bulk smush feature that enables you to compress 50+ images with just one click.
3. WP Fastest Cache
With over 1+ million installations, WP Fastest Cache is a top free caching plugin that is easy to set-up. It offers features such as page caching, gzip compression, minification of HTML/CSS and CDN support. This helps improve WordPress site speed and page load time. It also helps you to automatically delete all cache files once the post/page is published. Some of its premium features include image and database optimisation, lazy loading and sync with Google fonts.
4. WP-Optimize
This is a multi-purpose WordPress performance plugin that does it all. It helps you to compress images. It helps you to clean and optimise the database. It allows you to cache your web page, which leads to faster website speed and load time. WP-Optimize is a highly-effective tool that helps delete post revisions, spam posts, etc. It helps optimise your database tables. What’s more, it also lets you schedule automatic clean-up.
5. NitroPack
NitroPack is a cloud-based performance optimisation plugin that features built-in global CDN, HTML/CSS/JS minification & compression and a complete image optimisation stack. This is an advanced caching plugin that offers complete website speed optimisation. Once installed and activated, it can help optimise your site automatically. Most importantly, while it is a paid plugin for WordPress, it does offer free plans for small websites and testing purposes.
6. Advanced Database Cleaner
Over time, your WordPress database can get bloated with old drafts, post revisions and unused CSS/JS. This can affect your site’s speed leading to a higher bounce rate. The Advanced Database Cleaner plugin can help you to speed up your WordPress website by helping you delete orphaned items, trash, spam comments, expired transients. This plugin can also help optimise your database table and allow you to set-up automatic database cleanup on a schedule.
7. WP Super Minify
One of the easiest ways to reduce website loading time is to compress JS, HTML and CSS files and serve them to site visitors. The WP Super Minify plugin helps you to do this effortlessly. It also allows you to disable compression of CSS/JavaScript, in case there is any conflict. Since it only offers one feature – minifying JavaScript/CSS/HTML files – this plugin is quite lightweight and easy-to-use.
8. Perfmatters
If you’re wondering how to speed up a WordPress website quickly, then this plugin can help. It helps optimise your site’s performance swiftly by allowing you to enable/disable various options on your website with a single click. This includes disabling/limiting post revisions, disabling emojis, embeds, dash icons, removing query strings, removing RSS feed links and shortlinks. The best part, Perfmatters plugin helps reduce the overall HTTP requests made while rendering a web page, which helps boost page speed.
9. TinyPNG – Compress JPEG & PNG images
This plugin optimises the JPEG and PNG images, which helps speed up your WordPress load time. Once installed, any image uploaded on your site is carefully analyzed and automatically compressed without lowering its quality. The WordPress TinyPNG plugin also offers easy bulk optimisation for the existing media library. Plus, it helps save storage space and offers multi-site support with a single API key.
10. CloudFlare WordPress Plugin
While there are many best WordPress plugins to speed up your website, Cloudflare is a great plugin that offers automatic platform optimisation (APO). It helps you to serve your entire WordPress site speedily, no matter where the visitor is located. Some of its features include automatic caching, one-click WordPress-optimised settings, among others.
11. W3 Total Cache
A very effective WordPress site speed optimisation plugin for caching, W3 Total Cache also offers mobile device support. It is a free WordPress caching plugin with over 1 million active installations. Its key features include browser and database caching, minifying, object caching, CDN support and more. It also supports Accelerated Mobile Pages. More importantly, with its multitude of features, it helps save 80% of bandwidth which makes your site 10x faster.
12. ShortPixel
This is another image optimisation plugin that helps increase your site’s speed. It helps compress images with no file restrictions. It allows you to convert PNG to JPG and then converts it into WEBP images for Chrome users. ShortPixel is one of the best WordPress page speed plugins that helps boost user engagement. Plus, it uses its own API while optimising images, so you save on the bandwidth usage.
13. WP-Sweep
This optimisation plugin can help enhance your site’s performance with a single click. WP-Sweep is a free WordPress plugin that helps optimise your site’s database. Its key features include deleting spam comments, auto-drafts and post revisions. It also helps clean orphan and duplicated metadata. It works efficiently with WordPress 4.6 version or higher and is periodically updated by the developer making it extremely safe.
14. Asset CleanUp
This plugin is a free alternative to Perfmatters. It helps you to scan web pages and detect all assets that are loaded. It then allows you to edit and select the CSS/JS files that are not necessary to load, thereby helping you improve the load time. The Asset CleanUp plugin works best with a combination of cache plugin (WP Fastest Cache or W3 Total Cache) and a service like CloudFlare. What’s more, it offers a host of features that help boost page speed, making your site 2x faster.
15. WP Super Cache
Developed by Automattic, WP Super Cache generates static HTML files for the visitors instead of heavy WordPress PHP files. It is one of the best plugins to speed up WordPress sites and supports CDN. It has over 2 million active installations and is a great caching plugin for a beginner WordPress user.
Further reading: Must-have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites.
16. Lazy Load by WP Rocket
If your site has long blog posts with lots of images, then using the Lazy Load plugin can help reduce the load time significantly. Instead of downloading the entire page and images in one-go, this plugin loads images when needed, which helps increase page speed. It also offers lazy loading of YouTube thumbnails and iframes, which further improves your site’s performance.
17. AMP For WP: Accelerated Mobile Pages
With Google’s mobile-first indexing, ensuring your web pages load faster on mobile devices is of utmost importance and this is where the AMP for WP plugin can be helpful. It helps you to render web pages lightning fast on all mobile devices and browsers, which, in turn, helps drive more traffic and increases ranking on SERPs.
18. EWWW Image Optimizer
Compared to other image optimisation plugins, EWWW IO is the only plugin that lets you perform optimisation on your own web server, thereby offering data privacy. It offers PNG, JPEG, PDF and GIF optimisation. The best part, there are no restrictions on file sizes or the number of images uploaded.
19. CDN Enabler
This plugin’s main aim is to improve your WordPress speed through CDN (content delivery network). It helps decrease the distance between the user and the server, thus ensuring all users, irrespective of their geographic location, enjoy the same loading speed as the original server. CDN Enabler also works perfectly with all major third-party plugins.
20. WP User Avatar
While you can add custom avatars on WordPress using Gravatar, with this plugin, you can choose any image from your media library as a profile image. This helps improve website speed as avatars are rendered through a local database. WP User Avatar plugin also helps compress the images in the background, thereby increasing your site speed.
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Further Reading: How To Install, Activate And Setup Yoast SEO For WordPress
