I have been blogging with WordPress for more than nine years, and my hands-on experience with it leads me to believe that WordPress is one of the ideal frameworks for creating websites & blogs.
Due to it is easy to use features and a huge library of freely available plugins, even a newbie or non-coder can make pro websites using WordPress. The only condition, however, is that you should smartly implement the built-in functionalities and the right set of add-ons.
One of the most important features of WordPress that can be improved using add-ons i.e. plugins is its speed.
And after some recent updates in Google’s ranking algorithm, site loading speed has become even more important for getting a higher rank.
Here is a video guide for learning how to start speeding up WordPress:
So I think this is the perfect time to publish my first-hand list of useful increase website speed WordPress plugin. To verify whether these plugins work for your site or not, I recommend you to note down your site speed using Google Page Speed Insights or a similar tool before and after installation.
This way you will better comprehend their effect. Feel free to share your experience with these plugins after installing, & please do let me know if I am missing something.
May 2020 update:
Here are two more plugins which you should be using:
- Flying pages: Preload pages before users click on it.
- Flying scripts: Plugin to delay loading of 3rd party script. Seen noticeable speed improvement after using this plugin.
- Native Lazy load: Lazy load media files using the native browser feature. Launched by Google
WordPress plugins to Increase Website Speed
1. WP-Rocket
WP-Rocket plugin is the best WordPress fast loading plugin. This is an idle plugin for a new as well as an existing WordPress blog with high traffic. I have embedded a video blog (at the end of this post) to help you understand what this plugin does and how to use it.
In nutshell, WP-Rocket imposes automatic cache control of database objects, posts, pages, content, etc. on your WordPress site. It improves server-side performance, reduces download times and provides smooth CDN integration for faster site speed. It’s not a free plugin but it’s completely worth paying for.
Related read:
2. Asset Cleanup WordPress plugin
This is one plugin that a lot of WordPress users have not heard of. Asset cleanup plugin is perfect for any existing WordPress blog which has done all basic optimization such as cache, CDN, and others but still needs more improvement.
Using this plugin you can make sure which kind of scripts load on your pages. Start by watching the below video to understand how Asset cleanup plugin works and then start by optimizing your key pages.
This is a free plugin and you can start using it right away.
3. ShortPixel Image Optimizer Plugin
This plugin is must-have for sites with at least a couple of images per post and beneficial for other sites too. It reduces image file size by compressing JPG & PNG files and converting high size formats into JPG & PNG.
Though it performs loss-less image compression that doesn’t reduce image quality, you can optionally set it for lossy compression if the image’s visual quality is of no much importance to your site.
Here is a video tutorial on using ShortPixel plugin:
Related read:
4. Advanced Database Cleaner
One of the reasons for slow WordPress is usually boated database.
Most of the websites won’t have a huge database usually, but for sure there will be many redundant rows. Thankfully, removing such rows is not as much hard in WordPress as in other frameworks.
Advanced Database cleaner is a database optimization plugin that will automatically identify redundant i.e. useless entries in your database and make it sleeker by removing them.
Lesser rows mean faster queries which means faster site loading ultimately.
Though the difference made by this improvement is very minute, it is worth implementing because all you have to do is to install a plugin!
Related read:
5. Lazy Load for Videos
Similar to images in WordPress, videos can also be configured to load on user request only. Lazy Load For Videos will automatically identify videos in your post and replace them with a static thumbnail that will load video only when the user clicks upon thumbnail.
This reduces loading time for pages having video elements.
6. Plugin Organizer
The last plugin in my list is for keeping other plugins neatly arranged. As you identify the heavy and lighter plugins with P3, you will be easily able to decide which plugin is more important for your site and which is the least one.
With Plugin Organizer, you can make specific plugins load only on specific pages & set their loading order manually.
Along with this, I highly recommend you to configure Cloudflare with your blog. It’s free & it offers free CDN & makes your blog secure. You can read the benefits here.
Bonus video: increase website speed with WordPress plugin
Here is the over the shoulder video in which I showed how you can optimize a WordPress blog for faster loading:
So how useful did you find this post?
Please do let me know your experience or if I missed adding any WordPress speed plugin.
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Source: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/wordpress-plugins-faster-loading.html
