Before I share with you the best WordPress plugins for improving your website page speed, let’s understand what WordPress plugins are first. The WordPress plugins are small software bits which are used to make your WordPress site more efficient and functionable. Most WordPress plugins are free to use and you can access those through the WordPress Plugin Directory.
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WordPress plugins to improve your website speed
Researches show that any website which takes even some seconds late to load, loses potential leads and visitors. You won’t want that to happen to you, right? So here below are 10 best WordPress plugins which will help you to speed up the loading time of your website pages. Check them out.
1. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache comes free and is mostly chosen by small site owners. The premium paid plan comes with even more stunning and useful features. WP Fastest Cache offers great features like minifying HTML and CSS, CDN integration, easy setups etc. It offers a single click for clearing cache. And it also allows you to fix the expiration dates for all your pages or specific URLs.
2. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler comes with an extremely simple set up and an easy to use interface. It also allows you to set your expiration times and clears cache with a single click. You can also set post ID to exclude those from the cache. Cache Enabler offers free services and hence, is much adored by all its users. The minifying features are good and you can also set cache behavior etc. Cache Enabler offers nice services at no cost.
3. WP Super Minify
WP Super Minify offers it’s plugin services for free as well, like many others in this list. It allows you to disable compressing CSS or JavaScript if you need. And it comes with a very simple and easy to use interface which can be operated with decent convenience. The major features of WP Super Minify include minimizing the HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It is quite popular among users and is better for free usage.
4. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache offers praiseworthy features and most of them come free of cost for all its users. Those best features of W3 Total Cache include caching of objects and databases, minification of HTML etc, CDN Support and caching of databases and browsers too. However, when you uninstall the W3 Total Cache plugin, it takes a long time and lengthy process to follow suit.
5. WP Smush.it
WP Smush.it comes totally free and inexpensive for anyone interested to use it’s offered services. The major features of WP Smush.it include the option to run the existing images via the plugin and also integrating with the Smush.it API fluently. It is currently maintained by WPMU DEV. WP Smush.it allows you to optimize the JPEG compression and it strips the metadata from JPEG. It also strips the colours from images which are not required.
6. WP Rocket
WP Rocket gives amazing features to it’s users including page caching, and version rollback. It also offers cache preload, CDN integration, image lazy loading and Direct Cloudflare integration. The execution time of JavaScript is delayed too. And it offers a decent user friendly interface with database optimization too. In WP Rocket, there is minimal tweaking needed for improving the speeds as well.
And it comes at a great price begining from $49 only.
7. LazyLoad by WP Rocket
LazyLoad by WP Rocket is a great wordpress plugin to improve the page speed of your website. It comes free of cost too. This plugin only loads the specific stuff when required. This LazyLoad by WP Rocket offers many significant features and one of them includes replacing your YouTube iFrames with the preview thumbnails. It does not use JavaScript or jQuery, hence it is very light and easy to use. It also helps you replace the post thumbnails and images.
8. NitroPack
NitroPack offers a free plan for testing sites and small sites too. It of course has paid plans with more features, options and usage with customised footer. Some of its best features include DNS prefetching, HTML CSS and JS compression and minification, Defer JS loading and automatic image optimization. It also offers different caching types like browser and page. NitroPack gives automatic website optimization and also supports WordPress applications. It gives conversion of images to next gen formats as well.
9. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache also offers its service free of cost. And all its features are worth trying it. Some of its best offerings include good CDN support, preloading cache, serving static HTML files and many more. WP Super Cache also offers extended support for numerous caching types like Legacy, PHP etc. The set up of WP Super Cache is actually very simple and it is easier to operate as well.
10. Perfmatters
Perfmatters offers all its users quality features and services. Some of its best offerings include heartbeat control, Rest API control and a lightweight plugin as well. Perfmatters offers all its services starting from $24.95 per year. It disables the scripts on the basis of each page. And it works greatly with the existing caching plugin you have. Perfmatters also supports performance enhancers like Preconnect and DNS prefetch etc. It also disables the various WordPress options which slow down sites.
Best WordPress plugins to help you in your sites
All the above-mentioned WordPress plugins are the best of their kind. And all of them would definitely help you to improve the page speed of your website. However, do note that all the numbers assigned to each plugin are for representation purposes only. And therefore they do not define the quality or level of any plugin. You can try out the free ones first. And then select the one which suits your needs the best.
