Are you losing traffic, subscribers, and customers because your website is slow? Or perhaps you’re just looking for ways to speed up your WordPress installation? Luckily, we’ve put together a list of 5 of the most useful and powerful plugins that will speed up your load times.
WP Rocket
Price: From $49.
WP Rocket has an incredibly user-friendly interface, making the set-up process really easy when compared to other caching plugins – some of which you’d need to study a course to figure out!
With WP Rocket, you get all of the caching functionality you’d expect, along with a bunch of unexpected features that you’d normally need a few extra plugins for. Including lazy loading, database optimisation and the ability to host Google Analytics code on your site. Another great feature is the ability to delay Javascript execution, which can have a huge impact on loading times and Google PageSpeed scores.
Perfmatters
Price: from $19.95/year.
By default, WordPress has certain options enabled that aren’t necessary for most sites and can slow down performance. Perfmatters allows you to disable these options with the click of a few buttons.
However, the biggest thing that tends to slow down the rendering of your pages is un-needed HTTP requests. But with Perfmatters, you can disable these scripts on a per page basis. Meaning you can stop plugins from loading code where it isn’t needed. It also offers performance boosting features like DNS prefetch, preconnect, local Google Analytics script hosting, and more.
NitroPack
Price: Free and paid plans available from $17.50/month
NitroPack is not just a WordPress plugin, it is a complete speed optimisation platform. Instead of using several plugins to manually decide what needs to be optimised, NitroPack does it all for you on one simple platform.
Simply add your website URL, then install the connector plugin on your WordPress site. You can then choose how aggressive you want the optimisations to be and NitroPack will start optimising your site automatically. Plus, all of these optimisations are run by their own servers, thus reducing your own server usage.
The free plan is great for very small sites or testing purposes, but it will add a ‘powered by’ badge to your footer. Paid plans remove the badge and offer more resources.
Cache Enabler
Price – Free
Cache Enabler is a lightweight plugin from the team at KeyCDN. It is easy to set up and allows you to set cache expiry times as well as behaviours such as clearing after new posts. Overall, Cache Enabler is space on features – but that is the point of the plugin.
There is also a sister plugin called CDN Enabler, which will allow you to add a content delivery network service. It’s also lightweight and easy to set up.
WP Smush
Price: Free
Images are an integral part of websites; they make your content more meaningful and appealing. But, having the best quality images, usually means larger file sizes which in turn, takes a toll on website speed.
However, WP Smush can help to reduce the overall size of images without degrading their visual quality. It supports all standard image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF, and even eliminates metadata and unused colours from images. WP Smush is compatible with other plugins and will compress every image in your directory, it can optimise up to 50 images at a time.
Now is the time to optimise your website. According to statistics, half of us wouldn’t even wait two seconds for website content to pop up. So, don’t delay! If you need further advice on how to speed up your WordPress website, or would like help using or installing any of the plugins we have mentioned, please contact our friendly expert team now, we’d be happy to help!