The Best WordPress Plugins For A Speedy Website
There are literally thousands of plugins you can choose from for your WordPress website.
But it doesn’t mean you should go and install every plugin out there that catches your fancy. That’s just going to slow your website down especially when you get plugins conflicting with each other.
Resolving plugin conflict is a time-consuming endeavor, so it’s really not going to help you out with speeding your site.
When it comes to plugins, more doesn’t equal speed. You only need the essentials. Here are some of them:
What is a WordPress Plugin?
A WordPress plugin is a software that allows users to add additional features and functionality to their website without having to learn technical coding skills.
These are free and user-friendly tools that can help you create simple but effective websites.
There are thousands of plugins out there for use on your site; some are created specifically for WordPress, A plugin is a small piece of software that can extend the functionality of your website.
These are used to add extra features to your site such as email subscription forms, contact forms, search boxes, etc. They can then be added to your WordPress dashboard once downloaded.
Why Use Plugins?
Using WP plugins can save time, money, and even improve the efficiency of your website.
You won’t have to worry about learning complex technical code, saving you valuable time and providing a better experience for your visitors.
Not only does this make life easier for designers, but it also helps developers focus on developing great content instead of spending countless hours mastering back-end operations.
Plugins can take many forms from changing colors to adding a social media share button.
Some plugins are used to optimize a site based on SEO best practices, while others provide functionality specific to eCommerce sites.
However, the list below is just a small sampling of what you can do using WordPress plugins.
The 7 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For A Speedy Website
1. Caching plugin
A caching plugin will help your site load faster since your server won’t be serving your website files every time someone lands on your site.
Your plugin will help minimize your server’s workload.
While there are quite a number of good caching plugins out there, the most popular ones are
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache, and
- WP Fastest Cache
2. Lazy load plugin
Lazy loading basically means not loading your entire website all at once. If you’ve got long articles peppered with images and video, your site will be slower than normal.
That’s because your server has to send all the files at once.
With a lazy loading plugin, however, your browser will only show above-the-fold content first.
The rest of your website will be only shown when your visitor scrolls down the page. This effectively helps save bandwidth as well as speed up your site in the process.
Some of the top lazy load plugins are:
- a3 Lazy Load
- BJ Lazy Load
3. Minification plugin
Minification is one of the best ways to optimize and make your WordPress site run faster. All unnecessary characters in your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are removed.
This reduces the file size and consumes less bandwidth to transmit. Some of the top minification plugins are:
- WP Super Minify
- Autoptimize
4. Image compression plugin
If you upload lots of images to your site, then you can certainly benefit from an image compression plugin. For best results, however, it’s best if you resize your photos first to make them optimized for the web.
This means if you’ve got images that are more than 2000 pixels, then it’s best you resize it to a size less than that.
Your image compression plugin will then remove all the unnecessary metadata and unused colors from your images.
Here are some of the top image compression plugins for your consideration:
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization
- Imagify Image Optimizer
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer
You’re free to download and test the different plugins mentioned in this list, however, make sure you only choose one from each category and delete the rest, so you don’t slow your site down!
5. Yoast SEO Plugin
Yoast is arguably the best WordPress SEO plugin out there. With over one million downloads and thousands of satisfied customers, Yoast is one of the most popular plugins available today.
It has been optimized for speed and ease of use. You will find everything you need inside it, including detailed step-by-step tutorials, a clean user interface, and plenty of customization options.
This plugin does everything that its name implies. With this powerful tool, you can take full control over how your site is indexed by Google and other major search engines like Bing.
It lets you configure each page’s title, description, keywords, etc., and ensure that they are optimized for maximum exposure.
6. Page Builders Widget Plugins
Page builders have become increasingly popular with bloggers and small business owners who want to create unique, interactive web pages without writing complex HTML code.
You can use these plugins to add image galleries, video players, contact forms, social media links, and much more.
7. Google Analytics - Track Your Traffic
Analytics are tools that help you measure how much traffic your website gets, where it's coming from and what pages people visit after they arrive.
This information helps you find out if your site is working properly.
8. WP-Optimize - Increase Page Speed
- Optimizing Images
Images are critical parts of your website’s performance; however, they may not always load immediately after being uploaded.
Images can slow down your web pages dramatically due to their large size and resource-intensive nature. WP-optimize offers several ways to optimize images without affecting page speed.
By reducing image sizes and compressing them using different types of plugins, you can improve the quality of your site while keeping your pages fast!
- Compress HTML & CSS
This plugin allows you to compress HTML and CSS files for faster loading times. This plugin can reduce compression time by 90%.
- Combine JavaScript Files
Combining JavaScript files into fewer files can also help improve page speed. Using this plugin helps merge multiple small JS files into 1 single file that is smaller.
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