7 WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Website Page Speed

7 WordPress Plugins to Increase Your Website Page Speed

You put such a great amount of work into making your WordPress site, it’d be a shame if one small thing could be its whole undoing.

What’s that thing?

Speed.

If your site takes more time to load than it took you to read this paragraph, then you’re in a difficult situation.

Fortunately, there are WordPress plugins that will make your site load so rapidly your users won’t even notice they’re already using it.

What Plugins Can Make My WordPress Website Load Faster?

Here are some well-reviewed WordPress plugins to optimize your site.

1. WP Super Cache: Faster Rendering

2+ million active installations and 4.3 out of 5 stars dependent on 1,254 reviews.

Pros

• Free
• Made by Automattic, the company answerable for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Jetpack.
• Simple to use.
• Advanced settings let you choose:
  • Gzip compression
  • Browser caching
  • How content is cached
• How often cache should be updated
• You can preload content into the cache.
• Can help you set up a CDN.

Cons

• None

2. W3 Total Cache: Faster Rendering

1+ million active installations and 4.4 out of 5-star rating based on 4,602 reviews

Pros

• Free
• At least 10x improvement in overall site performance.
• Improvements in conversion rates.
• Improvements in search engine rankings.
• Up to 80 percent bandwidth savings.

Cons

• For small-time or new users, the complexity and all the features may undermine user-friendliness.

3. WP Super Minify: Compressing JavaScript & CSS Files

10,000 + active installations and 4 out of 5 stars based on 50 reviews.

Pros

• Free
• Minification
• Simple, three-step installation:
  • Download the plugin.
  • Upload it to the directory.
  • Activate it through the plugins menu.
• Many users get a 2 to 4% increase in Google page speed.

Cons

• More technical plugins increase Google page speed more.

4. WP Smush: Reducing Image Size

1+ million active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 5,251 reviews

Pros

• Free
• Reduces overall size of every image without compromising integrity or quality.
• Supports all common image formats including:
  • JPEG
  • GIF
  • PNG
• Removes unused colors from images.
• Compatible with other plugins.
• Compresses any image in your directory.
• Removes metadata from JPEG images.
• Can handle upwards of 50 images at once.
• Find and prioritize images that are slowing down your site.
• No monthly limits.

Cons

• None

5. BJ Lazy Load: Decreasing Pageload

80,000+ active installations and 4.2 out of 5 stars based on 88 reviews.

Pros

• Lazy loading

Cons

• Last update was 3 years ago.
• No tech support.

6. WP-Optimize: Optimizing the Database

900,000+ active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 1,199 reviews.

Pros

• Free
• WP-Optimize cleans up and optimizes databases so they run better.
• Schedule automatic clean-ups of:
• Revisions
• Spam comments
• Trashed content
• And more.
• Compact and defragment MySQL tables.
• See database statistics and potential savings.
• Compress images.
• Cache pages for faster load times.
• Defer CSS JavaScript.
• Granular control over optimizations.
• Configure a predetermined number of weeks’ worth of backup data during clean-ups.
• Set automatic pre-optimization backups.

Cons

• None

7. Autoptimize: Script Optimization

1+ million active installations and 4.7 out of 5 stars based on 1,145 reviews.

Pros

• Free
• Minification
• Concatenation
• Defers some scripts
• Lazy load images
• Toggle some basic scripts on and off.

Cons

Can be buggy, but tech support can be responsive enough to incorporate fixes into future versions.

We at CodeLedge, are Sweden’s best WordPress Development and optimization Services provider. We are the experts at making a website fast and easy to load. Feel free to talk with us at hi@codeledge.net or get a quote from here.