With so much information to process and the many competitors trying to outrank you on SERPs, site speed has become a key determinant on how your website performs, both in terms of user experience and particularly in bounce rate – both of which are ranking signals.
Check out: TOP 5 Fastest WordPress Themes
It is usual for sites to get slower as they age. However, there are a few tweaks you can employ to boost loading time. These plugins help you make your website faster to maintain and grow your audience and improve your ranking.
Here is a comprehensive review of 7 best plugins to make your website faster. Of course, just in case you didn’t know, great website speed starts from with fast server for your website, but these plugins can compliment this.
1. WPRocket
WPRocket is a premium-only super performer for caching your site. The latest version is WPRocket 3.0, which is extremely easy to use, and as soon as you activate the plugin, it should be good to go.
It offers features such as page caching, cache pre-loading (so that not even your first visitor to hit the cache will experience a delay) and multisite compatibility. WPRocket enables you to regenerate all the data in the cache selectively and works well even if your website is running on multiple servers. Tests have shown that it can make your site faster by more than 40% simply by enabling this.
2. WP Fastest Cache
With a logo featuring a cheetah, the fastest animal on the planet, we can already expect what kind of speed we should be getting with this plugin.
This is an easy-to-install plugin that generates static HTML files from your WP and caches the files. Its features include GZIP compression, JavaScript and CSS files consolidation to minimize requests, minification, and page specific cache blocking.
It also offers image optimization, Google Fonts sync, Lazy Load, and Database clean up. Users can also choose to delete cache logs. It has a unique feature where recurrent visitors to your site experience lower page load time. Most importantly, it supports multiple languages. However, it does not have WP multisite functionality yet.
3. WP Super Cache
This is actually a caching plugin owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, so you can expect this to be a great product!
This plugin serves your visitor’s cached version of your WordPress pages, with the pages becoming similar to static HTML files. It prioritizes static HTML over PHP scripts and reduces load time by serving a static cached version of HTML pages instead of dynamically generated and slow pages.
Its features include integration of content delivery networks such as CloudFlare, dynamic caching, page compression, and custom scheduler. The scheduler enables you to delete and re-cache at intervals. WP Super Cache is free and offers to cache for site visitors on mobile. It is easy to use, and it comes with an easy-to-master interface.
4. WP Smush It
Smush It is one of the best image compression plugins. It automatically resizes and optimizes images in your WP or multisite when you upload. Smush Pro is a handy space and speed booster. It works on images up to 32MB without compromising the image quality.
WP Smush comes in a free version and Pro version. With the pro version, you can compress multiple images, and preset image sizes before adding them to your WP library. You can also enable auto-smushing for all new photos as they upload. Although Smush works with Multisite, you can choose to manage sites individually. This is also an excellent plugin for those running WooCommerce with plenty of images because these can all be compressed in bulk.
5. CloudFlare WordPress Plugin
Cloudflare is a free plugin that offers 3 main features. It reduces page load time, boosts SEO and protects against some WP-specific weaknesses such as DDOS attacks.
It offers a single-click setup and auto cache delete on website updates. It also offers automatic HTTPS Rewrites that help your WP integrate recent security protocols and HTTPS-specific web-optimization features. CloudFlare comes with free SSL certificates for WP users. This helps improve your site’s ranking since Google favors pages with SSL.
6. BJ Lazy Load
This plugin hinders images from loading. It replaces some of the parts of a webpage with placeholders, which saves you load time and data. However, a user can view images that are in the view field but can’t see an image until they scroll to it. BJ Lazy Load also allows you to exclude certain posts from lazy loading.
Other settings on BJ Lazy Load include selecting a lazy load on:
- Content
- Thumbnails
- Smaller Gravatar images
- Themeloader
- An image class
7. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
Plugin Performance Profiler (P3) analyzes all your other plugins for efficiency and speed. It makes your website faster by allowing you to replace slow plugins.
Essentially, you run a scan using this plugin, discover which plugin is taking a lot of time and therefore is affecting your website loading speed, and then you can replace it or remove it so that your website can load faster.
It is compatible with multiple browsers, including Safari, 1E9, and Chrome. Once you install the plugin, scan, you can set it to auto scan for future use.
However, if you do not want to load your browser with plugins or you only perform periodic scans, you can disable P3, but do not uninstall it.
Wrapping Up
Keeping your site visitors and Google algorithms satisfied with your website could be a plugin away. These plugins are readily available. But, before you fiddle with complex configurations, make sure you have a WP professional on standby, so you don’t wreck your site.
