Why should you speed up WordPress site?
There are hundreds of reasons that might cause major concerns for you. Here are a few important ones.
- Various researches and studies have shown that that the sites taking more than 2 seconds to load usually have about 47 per cent of visitors bouncing off the website. SO, to avoid half of your visitors leave before displaying your content, it’s better to speed up your website.
- Search engines (like Google, Yahoo) rank fast-loading websites higher than the websites with slow loading speed. So, if you want to increase traffic to your website, speeding up your website should be your priority.
- If you’re running an e-commerce store on WordPress then you better be ready to put on major improvements to your site, if you want to increase profits. Online buyers are the most impatient persons, they don’t wait for the page to load if it doesn’t load within a second.
How to test the loading time of your website?
Before making improvements to your site, you need to analyse the current load time for your website. It’s possible that page load time may differ from page to page. Since it depends on the following factors.
- Type of content it hosts. Whether static or dynamic.
- The size of the page.
- Is it cached or not?
- The number of requests it generates.
There are thousands of tools to check your site speed with. Here are the few popular ones to look out for.
- Webpagetest.org
- Gtmetrix
- Page Speed Insights
- Tools.pingdom.com
- Load Impact
Top Free Plugins To Speed Up WordPress Site
Here are the top 10 plugins to speed up your website.
1. Perfmatters
Unlike most plugins in this list, Perfmatters takes a different approach to improve WordPress site speed. By default, WordPress has many unnecessary options enabled and lead to slow down the performance of your site. Perfmatters provides options to disable these unnecessary options with the click of a few buttons.
Features:
- Disables WordPress options that slow down your site.
- Perfectly works with your existing caching plugin.
- Supports DNS pre-fetch.
- More features in less plugin size
Price: From 20$ per year
2. WP Fastest Cache
Some plugins are too basic while others are too advanced. WP Fastest Cache somehow comes in the middle.
There are only three steps you need to go through. Install, activate, go through the setting, save and it’s done.
Features:
- Minify CSS and HTML.
- Can set expiration times for certain URL strings or all posts or pages.
- Free of Cost, Premium version also available with extra features.
- Can set posts/pages to exclude.
- Easy CDN integration
- Clear cache or minify CSS with one click.
Price: Free
3. WP Rocket
While some caching plugins require you to study an entire course to understand them out. WP Rocket makes everything look easy.
With WP Rocket you get everything you expect of the caching functionality. With a bunch of other features makes WP rocket a plugin ton rule all the plugins enlisted in this blog post.
Features:
- Page Caching
- Pre-load Cache
- User-friendly interface.
- Image lazy loading
- CDN integration
- Database optimization
- Minify CSS, HTML mad Javascript
- Cloudflare Integration
Price: Starting from 49$
4. WP Super Cache
Wp Super Cache is one of the most used caching plugins available for WordPress site. Its almost over 5.5 million downloads.
Features:
- Cache preload
- Supports CDN
- Serve static HTML files
- Multiple caching types support
Price: Free
5. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another well-known speed-boosting plugin. It’s more than just a simple caching plugin.
You can get a huge number of options and various caching methods.
Features:
- Database Caching
- Supports Cloudflare CDN and many other
- Object Caching
- Minifying CSS and Javascript
- And much more
Price: Free ( Premium Version also available with lots of other options)
6. WP Smush It:
WP smush is particularly used to optimise images and remove other unnecessary items.
Features:
- JPEG compression
- Smush It API integration
- Strips unnecessary and un-used colour from images.
- Runs existing images through the plugin
Price: Free
7. WP Super Minify
Minifying simply means to Combine HTML, CSS, javascript files so that they can be compressed and displayed to users in a way that lowers page loading time. WP Super Minify does the minifying perfectly with a single click.
Features:
- Easy to use and straight forward
- Disable compress of CSS/JS with one click
- Minifies CSS, JS AND HTML to a great extent
Price: Free
8. WP Optimise
Running a WP blog or site can lead to a highly inefficient database. Every time we create a new page, a copy of that page is added to the database. If we edit it multiple times, WordPress will create a pack of multiple copies in the database. Now, imagine if you edit a post 100 times, it’ll create 100 revisions of it. that means WP will put much of your database space to no use. It can lead to slow down of your website/ blog speed.
WP optimise allows you to clean up this mess and optimise your database to put it into good use.
Features:
- Bulk compression
- Restore Originals’ function
- Auto-compress function
- Compress Big Files function
- An intelligent, multi-pass lossy compression algorithm
Price: Free
9. LazyLoad by WP Rocket
If a visitor hits your web page and it is a long page with lots of images embedded in it, it can skyrocket your web page loading time. This is because images take a longer time to load than other data on the web page.
LazyLoad optimises your web page in such a way that certain specific elements that take time to load, only load when they are needed.
Features:
- Replaces Youtube iFrames with preview thumbnails.
- No use of jQuery or Javascript so it’s ultra light-weight.
- Replaces post images, post thumbnails etc
Price: Free
10. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a lightweight caching plugin that comes with an option to set cache expiry date, minification setup and many other options.
Features:
- Easy to use
- Clear cache with one click
- Set expiration times
- Minification feature
Price: Free
Conclusion:
Just one of the plugins listed above can have a dramatic effect on your site page speed. Here, we have listed the top ten free plugins to speed up WordPress site to let you choose between them. All of them have their own features and options. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a perfect performance plugin free of cost, WP Fastest Cache is the best option to start off with.
Nasyx Nadeem is a WordPress blogger with an experience of more than 5 years. Naysx Nadeem authors the thewphub blog. Where he writes how-to guides around Blogging, SEO, and other things related to blogging. For any type of query or something that you think is missing, please feel free to contact me.