Installation of the ideal performance plugins are one of the optimization tasks you can make on your WordPress website for optimized page speed. Enhancing the performance of your WP site is among the things you can do to shine in this competitive internet world.
In this article, you will learn the benefits of a fast loading website, how to create a strong base for speed optimization, and about the best WordPress performance plugins to install.
The Benefits of a Fast Loading WordPress Website
The best way to impress your website visitors is to ensure the loading is fast. Whenever a visitor comes to your website, he/she uses the experience to decide if your website is reliable. If your site takes time to load, your visitors will hit the back button, and some might never visit again.
The benefits of a fast loading website are that it increases user satisfaction and clicks on your website. As a result, there is an increase in revenue and vice versa.
On the other hand, poor user experience metrics might lower your site ranking in the search engines. According to various studies, one of the Google ranking factors since 2010 is page speed.
How to measure the performance of your WordPress Page Speed
It is impossible to optimize your WordPress site page speed if you are unaware of the present performance. By good luck, you can use multiple tools to conduct speed tests and get a baseline figure of your site.
Remember, if your website loads fast on your computer that does not mean the loading experience of your visitors are fast. Instead, their loading speeds depends on various factors. For example, if they own a cached version of your website, the speed of their internet connection, and their geographical location.
Some of the most popular WordPress speed tester tools you can use in determining the performance of your site include IsItWP, Pingdom, and GTMetrix.
The best loading time performance is under 2 seconds. This means the lower the number, the better the performance.
What are the Causes of Slow Loading in the WordPress Website?
The performance of your WordPress website depends on many factors. By running your website through any of the above speed tools, you might get a list of the causes that need improvements.
Nevertheless, these reports’ technical information should not overwhelm you because most WordPress performance plugins fix these issues automatically.
Common factors that lead to a slow loading website includes:
- Chosen web host: Your chosen web host should perfectly support the size of your website and traffic. Besides that, your host should have proper configuration and running efficient server hardware and software for efficient site performance.
- Installed plugins: You should only install plugins for features that you must have on your site. Otherwise, your website will slow down when you install many bloated, non-updated, or inactive plugins.
- Your website size: Although large websites can load fast, you need to choose the ideal hosting plans. Moreover, you need to start extra optimization steps to decrease the entire size of your website.
- Theme quality: Choose a WordPress that is minimal, fast, and lightweight. In most cases, bloated themes result in slower websites, making page speed optimization difficult.
How to Create a Strong Foundation for Speed Optimization
Optimization of your WordPress website page speed goes past the installation of plugins. Although the ideal plugins are vital, you need a strong foundation. Here is how to create a strong foundation to optimize your site speed:
Select a Lightweight Theme
You should select a lightweight WordPress theme to keep all things simple. However, it is easy to get overwhelmed during your search, as you choose from thousands of WP themes.
The best WordPress Themes have these requirements:
- A reliable support team popular for quality support.
- Multiple quality reviews.
- The smooth code base with less bundled features.
Purchase a Quality Host
The success of your WordPress website depends on your chosen web host. Irrespective of choosing a lightweight theme and installing the ideal plugins, your website will break if the host is of poor quality.
In most cases, it is tempting to invest in a cheap web hosting service provider, but you need to upgrade once your website starts to grow.
Because you are running a WordPress website, you should invest in any of the WordPress managed host.
Setup a CDN
The use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is essential in improving your site’s performance. Luckily, most web hosts give free CDN integration.
If your chosen web host does not offer CDN setup, choose a WordPress performance plugin that offers CDN integration.
Optimize Your WordPress Site Speed: Best WordPress Performance Plugins
To optimize your WordPress site page speed, you need to use the best WordPress performance plugin. Although there are multiple performance plugins, all you need is to decide the cause of slow performance and then choose the right plugin.
You do not need to handle these complex performance issues by yourself. Instead, you need to install an easy-to-use plugin to enhance your site’s loading speed and performance with just a click.
Here are some benefits of WordPress Performance Plugins on your site:
- Integration with CDNs enhances the page speeds even further.
- Single-click image compression.
- Code compression and minification make your site smaller.
- Integrated caching leads to fast loading speeds.
Here are the best WordPress Performance Plugins for fully optimized page speeds:
1. Cloudflare CDN
If your web host does not offer CDN integration, then you can use the Cloudflare CDN plugin to configure your website.
CDNs store many versions of your website on servers all over the world. Anytime a user visits your site, they receive a version of your website that is near their physical server. As a result, this process reduces the loading time of your site.
Other benefits of a CDN such as Cloudflare includes:
- An integrated firewall to secure your site against online security threats.
- Protection of your site from DDoS attacks, which might take your site offline.
- Comes with a shared SSL certificate that enhances the security and trust of your website.
To make sure no attack will affect your website’s performance, you need to improve its security. For most website owners, the free version of this plugin is more than enough. However, if you want your site to have higher speed and performance, buy the paid version at $20/month.
Besides the detailed FAQ and help section, this tool has an active community that will help you fix any issue.
2. WP Rocket
The WP Rocket plugin is the best optimization plugin you can ever choose. It features everything you need in an ideal speed optimization plugin. Unlike most caching and optimization plugins that are vital but unnecessarily complex, this plugin is simple and easy to use.
Among the features available in this user-friendly package is:
- Cloudflare CDN integration.
- The image lazy loading.
- Cache pre-loading to enhance the search engine indexing.
- Easier and simple setup.
- Immediate activation of page and post caching.
- Compression of static HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
The cost of WP Rocket is $49/year for one website and $99 for three websites. However, you can buy the $249 option for unlimited websites.
3. WP-Optimize
This plugin helps you to clean up all your WordPress databases. Although you can do this task manually, it is time-consuming and tedious.
Therefore, you can save yourself from the hassle and allow the WP-Optimize plugin to do the entire heavy task on your behalf. All your WordPress databases fill with junk data, rewrites, and clutter data as time goes by.
To drop all the information you no longer need, you need to run this plugin through all your databases. The work of this plugin is to make your website run smoothly by making your databases smaller and optimized.
Finally, the developers of the famous WordPress clone and backup UpdraftPlus plugin built the WP-Optimized plugin.
4. WP Smush Pro
The WP Smush Pro is not an ordinary optimization plugin. Instead, it is an award-winning pro plugin for image optimization. Although your website must have images, multiple large images on your site lead to slow page loading.
Apart from compressing and optimizing your images, you can use this plugin for other work like resizing images. As of today, this tool has optimized over 34 billion images.
Furthermore, you can use the free version of this plugin to:
- Search and find any large image that is making your site slow.
- Activate lazy loading to prevent the loading of off-screen images.
- Compress images without affecting the quality.
- Automatically resize images to suit pre-set dimensions.
- Optimize a max of 50 images using a click of a button.
Without many heavy images, websites can use the free version because you can optimize an unlimited number of images if they are less than 5MB.
On the other hand, the premium version of the WP Smush plugin offers advanced features such as:
- Extra compression choices to compress one or many images.
- Increase backups of original images.
- Lossy compression of images without loss of quality.
- Compressing and optimizing large images with a max size of 32MB.
Besides, you can buy an all-in-one membership for $49/month. This allows you to enjoy a 30-day free trial and all Smush Pro features.
5. W3 Total Cache
The other all-in-one WordPress performance in this list is W3 Total Cache. This plugin has more than 2,900 5-star reviews. An indicator that users get the best.
Besides caching, this plugin offers features such as:
- Google AMP and SSL support.
- Caching for an object, database, and browser.
- Mobile page caching support.
- CDN integration for enhanced performance.
- Minification for page, post, CSS, and JavaScript.
Although this plugin is feature-rich, it is not easy to set up due to its features. Therefore, you need time to learn how to use this plugin. It is ideal for users who love playing around with settings.
6. WP Fastest Cache
As the name suggests, the WP Fastest Cache offers faster solutions on many fronts. This plugin is easier to set up, and it offers blazing fast speeds to your site.
Moreover, WP Fastest Cache has an amazing balance between being easier to use and feature-rich. Some of its features are minification, CDN support, advanced caching, performance optimization, and others.
After installing this plugin, you are free to set up the features you need with a few clicks. For most users, the right option is the free version. Nonetheless, you can upgrade to the pro version for $44.99.
It is worth mentioning that you must first install the free version to upgrade to the premium version.
Conclusion
The speed of your WordPress website can either make your site break or successful. To optimize the page speed of your site, install any of the above WordPress performance plugins. Other performance plugins to use are a3 Lazy Load, All-In-One WP Security and Firewall, WP-Sweep, WP Super Minify, and Perfmatters.
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