The load speed of your website is the number one thing that you should work on and if your blog’s load time is very slow than you will lose a lot of your visitors and thus your earnings. If your website takes forever to load, do you think your visitors will stick to your site and wait it to load fully? Kissmetrics has reported that 47% of the users expect the page to load within 2 seconds so if your blog isn’t loading in two seconds then your visitors will go to some other site.
Page Speed is a lot important and if you are not giving it the top priority then you are losing on a lot of things. It’s not that hard to speed up your WordPress site as there are many plugins available to help you do that with some simple clicks. If you go through the WordPress Plugin directory, you will find hundreds of plugins that are meant to speed up your site. But not all of them are the best ones and so in this post, I have made a list of the best WordPress plugins to increase your site’s speed.
So go through these 10 best WordPress plugins, install the best one on your site and reduce the load time of your blog and increase your website’s speed.
1. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is the number one plugin to reduce the load time of your WordPress blog. With W3TC installed on your blog, you can enable page cache, browser cache, object cache, minify Javascript and CSS and has been designed to optimize your site and increase the page speed of your blog. The plugin is recommended by many hosting providers as well like Bluehost, Dreamhost, MediaTemple, GoDaddy etc.
You can even set up a CDN service like MaxCDN with W3 Total Cache by following some really simple steps. Adding W3TC plugin to a CDN service will work wonders for the speed of your site.
2. WP Super Cache
This is an alternative plugin to W3 Total Cache and works the same way as the previous one. In fact, I would consider it more of a competitor rather than describing it as an alternative.
The main feature of WP Super Cache is that it produces static HTML files from your WordPress blog. After that your server will then load this light HTML files rather than loading the heavier PHP scripts thus increasing your blog’s load time. These static files will be served to most of your visitors but it won’t be served to the ones who are logged in or who leave a comment on your blog. It’s so good that it comes pre-installed with your blog hosted on HostGator hosting.
3. WP Smush.It
An awesome plugin by WPMUDev team which allows you to optimize your images for better performance. WP Smush.It will compress your images without losing the quality to maintain a proper performance.
Once you install the plugin, you can run the Bulk Smush of the images if you already have many images. When you add new images to your blog, you don’t need to worry about that as now the plugin will automatically smush those images in the background.
4. WP Optimize
WP Optimize is one of those plugins that you should always install on every blog that you run. It’s a must have plugin that helps you optimize your database and remove all the unwanted junk from your blog that is taking up all the storage on your server.
With WP Optimize, you can easily delete all the post revisions and auto-drafts from your blog, remove spam comments, clean out the trash posts and comments, delete all the trackbacks and pingbacks and the best part is that you can set it up to run automatically.
5. WP Minify
If you are using W3 Total Cache and using the minify option in the plugin then you don’t have to install WP Minify on your blog. However if you are not using W3TC, then you should install this plugin on your blog to compress the Javascripts and CSS files.
The plugin easily detects all the JS/CSS files on your WordPress blogs and it passes these list of files to the Minify engine which then returns a minified and compressed version of the files which are easier to load and which will increase your site’s speed.
6. jQuery Image Lazy Load Plugin
We all use images in our posts and when someone visits an article on your blog, the images in whole posts loads at the same time giving you decreased blog speed.
In order to stop images loading immediately, you can use the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin on your blog. This plugin will make sure that the images are loaded only when they appear on screen. It means that as you scroll down, the images will load accordingly.
Download JQuery Image Lazy Load plugin
7. Digg Digg
Sharing your posts on social media is one of the best ways to attract new readers to your blog so you show social media buttons in your individual posts so that your readers can share it with their friends.
But sometimes these social media icons also put a heavy load on your servers thus slowing down your blog. However you can use Digg Digg plugin in your blog to solve this issue. The plugin is extremely light-weight and won’t cause much problem on your blog.
8. P3 Profiler
In this post, we are discussing about the best WordPress plugins to speed up your site but what if your plugins are the ones causing your site to load too slow? How are you going to know which plugin is impacting your site’s speed?
P3 Profiler is one amazing plugin that will create a profile and show you which of your installed plugins are the causing an impact on your site’s performance. You can then choose to keep them or replace them with an alternative.
9. Plugin Organizer
With P3 Profiler, you can tell which plugins is causing the most impact on your site’s performance and with Plugin Organizer you can decide which plugin should be loaded first.
So change the order that your plugins are loaded when someone visits your site or selectively disable the plugins by any post type. The combination of P3 Profiler and Plugin Organizer will help you in increasing your site’s speed easily.
Your Turn:
I have listed the best WordPress plugins that can speed up your site but I also agree that these are not the only ones and you might be using some other plugins to do that task. If you are using any other plugins to improve your blog’s speed and loading time then do share it with us in the comments below!
