It’s important to choose WordPress themes and plugins optimized for speed and/or minify the code of your current theme to lower the strain on your server. Knowing the different factors that affect site speed can help you identify which best sidebar widgets for wordpress you need for your own site. Whether you need to optimize images, disable unused files, or to minify your code — we have an array of plugins chosen for you.
As a WordPress user, fixing speed issues is worth it for both user experience and audience growth. Page speed is a known SEO ranking factor. For this reason, a faster loading site can help increase your visibility and organic traffic. Therefore, it’s wise to choose plugins and tools that will help you serve and grow your audience.
In this post, we’ll walk through some of the best WordPress plugins to improve site speed. But before we dive into our favorite plugins, we need to go over factors that contribute to website loading time in the first place.
WP Fastest Cache
Optimize the performance of your website with WP Fastest Cache. Improve Google PageSpeed, Core Web Vitals, GTmetrix and Pingdom score with our wp cache plugin. In addition, page speed is a ranking factor in Google’s search algorithm. Therefore, using cache plugins helps improve your SEO ranking. Our WordPress optimization plugin not only accelerates your site but also boosts SEO rankings.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a powerful caching plugin to make your site faster in just a few clicks. You’ll easily boost your loading time and improve your Lighthouse performance score thanks to options such as Delay JavaScript Execution, Remove Unused CSS, and LazyLoad. Such features are also crucial to optimizing Core Web Vitals and delivering a great user experience.
There are some advanced features that are quite easy to implement. This includes delaying Javascript execution free widgets for wordpress time which can have a huge impact on page load times and Core Web Vitals.
WP-Optimize
Whenever a WordPress user adds a new post, WordPress creates a revision for the same page or post. For example, if a blogger edits a post four times, WordPress creates three copies of the same post as revisions. This leads to inefficiency in the database.
Besides, a blog with multiple posts may have received numerous spam messages and unapproved comments in the comments section. WP-Optimize helps resolve this issue by removing unnecessary revisions that result in bloat and slow access.
EWWW Image Optimizer
Effortlessly compress images to resize your existing images and reduce the space they occupy on your server. The dimensions of the images will remain unchanged, allowing for optimized storage. Fine-tune the compression level and choose whether to create backups of the original images. Please note that image compression feature is exclusive to the SiteGround Environment. If you frequently upload large images to your website, you can enable the Maximum Image Width option that automatically resizes existing and future images whose width exceeds 2560 pixels. By optimizing image sizes, you can enhance your website performance and reduce bandwidth usage.
Speed Optimizer
The award-winning Speed Optimizer plugin is a free WordPress performance-boosting solution to improve user experience, increase conversion rates and drive more traffic. Achieve better SEO rankings, improve Core Web Vitals and enhance your Google Page Speed Score.
Developed by the WordPress speed experts at SiteGround, our free plugin is actively used and trusted by more than 2 million website owners. It’s specially designed to be easy to use, allowing users of all skill levels to make complex speed optimizations, such as minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript, image compression and lazy loading, in a few clicks.
Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a WordPress optimization plugin that takes a different approach to improving page load times than most others on this list. By default, WordPress has certain options enabled that aren’t necessary for most sites and slow down performance. Perfmatters makes it possible to disable these options with the click of a few buttons. But, the biggest thing that tends to slow down the rendering of your pages is HTTP requests that aren’t needed. Perfmatters also allows you to disable these scripts on a per page basis. This means you can stop plugins from loading code where it isn’t needed.
WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. This is mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if supercaching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too. This mode is always enabled but you can disable caching for known users, URLs with parameters, or feeds separately. Set the constant “DISABLE_SUPERCACHE” to 1 in your wp-config.php if you want to only use WP-Cache caching.
https://gtmetrix.com/
https://pagespeed.web.dev/
https://tools.pingdom.com/
Poorly optimized website performance is overwhelmed with a number of issues including slow loading times, being non-user friendly, user incompatibilities, and so on. These issues show that your website is not just losing conversion on the website, but in the future, this loss is magnified to worsen site results. The final impact — lots of potentials leads down the drain because of a few seconds difference.
Loading time is the total time taken to present your website in front of visitors. So, a website taking more time to show up for users will tend to lose its visitors and conversions resulting in a high bounce rate. Therefore, Boosting the website performance from an SEO perspective enables you to achieve new benchmarks in the journey of customer acquisition.