Does your website load super fast for your users? If not, here are 18 WordPress plugins that can help speed up your site.
You put so much work into making your WordPress website, it’d be a shame if one little thing could be its entire undoing.
What’s that thing?
Speed.
If your website takes longer to load than it took you to read this paragraph, then you’re in trouble.
Luckily, there are WordPress plugins that’ll make your website load so quickly your visitors won’t even notice they’re already using it.
Here are a few reasons why you want your website to load in under 3 seconds.
Here are some popular options for testing your website load speed.
There are several things you can do to make your website load faster.
When choosing hosting, make sure it :
The size of your site can affect loading speed, so make sure you have suitable hosting and proper optimization to get the size down to as low as possible without compromising on user experience or quality.
Your website’s homepage is the first impression you make.
So, it’s important that it be optimized and load as quickly as possible.
It helps to show only excerpts of content and reduce the total number of posts.
Remove everything you don’t need and focus on content and functionality.
Even something as small as a widget should only exist because of its use for visitors.
A poorly coded WordPress theme will affect:
Plugins should only be installed when they’re used because they only slow down your website if they’re:
WordPress optimization plugins tend to focus on several key features:
Caching is one of the most frequently employed methods of getting your website to load faster.
Caching is a practice that results in a faster WordPress website and improved performance.
In and of itself, cache is data that’s temporarily stored for fast access upon request.
Most often, computers need to run several processes to retrieve information before it’s made available.
Cache speeds this process up by storing the most commonly accessed data in temporary storage. WordPress websites can do the same thing.
WordPress is a dynamic content management system (CMS), which means that every visit to a WordPress website requires getting data from a database and performing several functions before WordPress gets to your browser.
Thanks to caching, WordPress can forgo many of these steps by making a copy of the page after the first visit and then use that page for every visit thereafter.
This can significantly optimize your website.
That’s why so many plugins for WordPress deal with cache.
Simply put, Ajax updates part of a web page without reloading the entire page. Ajax can be very helpful, but it can also be a drain on your central processing unit (CPU)
Heartbeat API is WordPress’s built-in simple server polling API.
It allows for almost real-time frontend updates. Controlling it saves you CPU usage and keeps your AJAX at a reasonable amount.
To defer scripts means to load your CSS or JavaScript files last so your website becomes accessible to visitors faster.
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a network of servers spread out across a particular geographic location for the purpose of delivering faster content delivery based on which server is closest to you).
Instead of loading an entire page at once, which may take too long, this plugin seamlessly loads only the parts being viewed by the visitor at that moment.
Minification reduces website load time by eliminating redundancies and superfluous content in:
This is the process of combining separate files into one file to reduce how many requests are on your site.
Here are some well-reviewed WordPress plugins to optimize your website.
2+ million active installations and 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 1,254 reviews.
Pros
Cons
1+ million active installations and 4.4 out of 5-star rating based on 4,602 reviews
Pros
Cons
10,000 + active installations and 4 out of 5 stars based on 50 reviews.
Pros
Cons
1+ million active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 5,251 reviews
Pros
Cons
80,000+ active installations and 4.2 out of 5 stars based on 88 reviews.
Pros
Cons
900,000+ active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 1,199 reviews.
Pros
Cons
1+ million active installations and 4.7 out of 5 stars based on 1,145 reviews.
Pros
Cons
200,000+ active installations and 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 562 reviews.
Pros
Cons
100,000+ active installations and 4.2 out of 5 stars based on 110 reviews.
Pros
Cons
90,000+ active users and 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 92 reviews
Pros
Cons
90,000+ active installations and 4.9 out of 5 stars based on 803 reviews.
Pros
Cons
200,000+ active installations and 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 134 reviews.
Pros
Cons
20,000+ active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 140 reviews.
Pros
Cons
100,000+ active installations and 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 50 reviews.
Pros
Cons
20,000+ active installations and 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 94 reviews.
Pros
Cons
400,000+ active installations and 4.3 out of 5 stars based on 201 reviews.
Pros
Cons
100,000+ active installations and 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 981 reviews.
Pros
Cons
800,000+ active installations and 4.7 out of 5 stars based on 882 reviews.
Pros
Cons
With so many plugins for WordPress optimization to choose from, it can be helpful to read user reviews and take note of the number of active installations.
But even then there’s an abundance of riches because so many of the PlugIns enjoy 100,000+ if not 1,000,000+ active users and great reviews.
At that point, it’s simply a matter of experimenting to figure out which plugins work best for you.
At the end of the day, though, the real winners are the visitors to your website, who’ll enjoy a fast load time and get the most out of your hard work.
More Resources:
Image Credits
All screenshots taken by author, October 2020
Get our daily newsletter from SEJ’s Founder Loren Baker about the latest news in the industry!
Jon Clark is the Managing Partner and chief SEO at Moving Traffic Media, a boutique digital marketing agency in New … [Read full bio]
Subscribe to our daily newsletter to get the latest industry news.
Subscribe to our daily newsletter to get the latest industry news.
