If your website is taking more than 2 seconds to load and the page size is greater than 2 MB, it’s a matter of concern and you should spend some time fixing it.
To help you save your time, I have created a list of some speed optimization WordPress plugins that are useful for decreasing the loading time and enhancing the performance of your blog or website.
Before installing any of the plugins listed, you should check the speed scores on Google PageSpeed insights or Gtmetrix. They will show you all possible optimization steps you need to follow.
Altogether, these plugins will help you speed up your WordPress blog in minimal time with minimal effort.
WP Rocket
Consistently rated as the easiest and fastest to configure cache plugin by its users, The WP Rocket is a cache plugin even managed hosts like Kinsta love to use.
WP Rocket is a cache plugin specifically made to handle every aspect of the cache for WordPress users. It helps you to handle page and browser cache along with the static compression of HTML files. It also includes the following features:-
- Sitemap Preloading
- GZIP Compression
- Browser Caching
- Database Optimization
- Google Fonts Optimization
- Remove Query Strings from Static Resources
- LazyloadMinification / ConcatenationDefer
- JS Loading
- Cloudflare Compatibility
- CDNDNS PrefetchingMobile DetectionMultisite Compatibility
- eCommerce Friendly
- Multilingual Compatibility
- Import/ExportDeveloper Friendly
The WP Rocket plugin is a premium option, and its pricing is $39 for single sites.
Nitropack
Nitropack is one new addition to the list of WordPress speed optimization plugins. And it has become insanely popular lately.
Founded in 2018, Nitropack is the most recent plugins that aim to make WordPress websites faster.
The main focus of Nitropack is to automate every aspect of speed optimization and get your site the highest Google PageSpeed score possible.
Visit the Nitropack homepage and enter your website to run a short test. It will show you the difference between the current PageSpeed for your website and what you can achieve with Nitropack installed.
Nitropack is an all in one plugin. This one plugin has:
- Image compression.
- Caching.
- Built-in CDN.
- Advanced cache awareness.
- CSS, HTML, and Javascript minification with Critical CSS preloading and prefetching.
And more.
Nitropack is highly effective, especially if you’re on a shared server. The before and after test results are impressive.
My favorite part about it is the improvement it shows in TTFB (Time to first byte). TTFB is generally not easy to decrease, but Nitropack does it. So, it’s a great plugin for slow servers and custom, design-heavy websites.
In terms of support, as per y experience, they have pretty quick and highly knowledgeable support staff. Your queries will be solved to the root without much trouble in communication and timing.
Autoptimize
if you are on a managed WordPress hosting and you have a slow website, The Autoptimize plugin is for you.
Autoptimize is a simple plugin that helps you extra minify tour javascript, CSS/HTML files with few clicks.
You can also choose the “Extra” minification and compression settings to furthermore compress the aggregate files. This plugin is Free, isn’t so complicated and no configuration is required for using its full potential.
You can use it with every other cache plugin except W3 Total cache because it has these options preinstalled.
I am using it on BforBloggers too and ever since I have installed Autoptimize, the loading speed has been consistently under 1.8 seconds.
Shortpixel
The size of the images you upload is the biggest hurdle while loading your website. If they aren’t optimized, they will affect the overall speed and UX.
Shortpixel is a fantastic plugin I have been recommending to everyone. It is an image compression plugin that uses lossless image compression to further decrease the size of your blog post images, thumbnails, etc.
Shortpixel gives you access for free, and you can compress up to 100 images in a given month.
If you upload many PDF files online, you may want to install EWWW optimizer plugin which compresses your images as well as PDF files.
Discover Shortpixel and get 100 images free.
Query Monitor
Most of the plugins you install take up a small space in your server disk space. They process their data once a request is made by a user.
That’s why installing Poorly coded or heavy plugins can affect your overall loading speed.
To monitor how much time a particular plugin takes to load and render, you can use the query monitor debugger plugin which scans through your database and shows you the exact time taken by each plugin to load successfully.
By looking at the results, you can safely replace the most time taking plugin with another similar functioning one, that takes minimum time to load.
Elementor Page Builder
If you’re a freelancer and create web pages using WordPress often, look nowhere else than Elementor.
Elementor is a user-friendly, drag-and-drop page builder that helps you to build beautiful and high converting pages with ease. The best part is the speed segment. Elementor uses very lightweight CSS and HTML codes that don’t affect your blog’s loading speed at all.
It still delivers a great user experience and recently, they have added a new feature prior to the Gutenberg release. The new add-on is called blocks. The blocks will help its users to build any website faster than ever.
Lazy Load Plugin By WP media
The Lazy Load plugin by WP Rocket helps you to make your website faster by adding a small piece of script that makes every image load only after the visitor scroll down to its position.
This will affect every image on your website, including the thumbnails. Unless and until visitors are eager to see the image, it won’t load. Hence, your website should load faster, even on slow connections.
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is one of the most underused and overlooked speed optimization factors that can reduce the page load time of your WordPress blog significantly.
We revise our posts many times and WordPress stores every revision, of course for every post, in its database. It also stores every draft, tables created by plugins, change-logs, backup files, etc., in its database.
Now each of these files is taking up disk space on your server and eventually, by the time, this will slow down your WordPress dashboard. To help us clean our database, we have an absolute plugin by Updraftplus developers, The WP-Optimize.
This plugin automatically cleans every trash and unnecessary file from your database including trash and spam comments as well as tables and unwanted junk files.
No configuration needed, install the plugin, schedule the automatic cleanup rule and your WordPress database will be cleaned up automatically.
Thrive Comments
If your getting a lot of comment on your blog, consider yourself super lucky as your audience seems to be impressed with your content.
However, if you are getting hundreds of comments on your blog posts, it will soon turn out to be a problem for you.
To make each and every comment available on a single page, WordPress will increase the page size. This will affect the overall loading speed pretty very much, especially if you are on a shared hosting server.
Thankfully, we have Thrive comments, an amazing comment system plugin developed by Thrive themes.
Thrive comments supports and comes with an Inbuilt lazy load for the comments module, which makes the comment system load after the page has loaded successfully and visitors wish to see and write a comment.
SUCURI
Sucuri firewall and protection plugin is something every WordPress user should have.
I included this plugin in my top 5 essential plugin list, and ever since I have been using them to further enhance the overall User experience on my blog.
Sucuri helps you to speed up your site by eliminating the spam and fake bot traffic from your server and on the same note, it protects you from brute force and other attacks.
With Sucuri, you will save the precious bandwidth on your server by giving more speed and resource access to your real users rather than distributing the resources to fake online bots that are useless.
Async Javascript Plugin
If you have ever checked your websites’ speed on Gtmetrix, you might have come through the term “remove the render-blocking javascript.”
This plugin will eliminate Render-blocking Javascript in the above-the-fold content for you.
Render-blocking Javascript prevents above-the-fold content on your page from being rendered until the javascript has finished loading completely. This will impact your page speed.
It can also impact your user’s experience as they would have to wait too long and it might happen that they won’t see some elements on your site if they have a slow internet connection.
Async JavaScript gives you full control of which scripts to add an ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attribute to or to exclude to help improve the performance of your WordPress website effectively.
Discover Async javascript plugin
I hope the plugins listed here would help you to get your WordPress website to load faster. I would suggest you keep updating any of the plugins you have installed currently as well as the ones you will in the future.
Up to date, plugins ensure further enhancement and bug fixes that might ever affect your website. You may want to read my WordPress Speed guide to furthermore speed up your WordPress site by focusing on other elements.
Keep in mind, you don’t need all of these plugins at the same time. Select and install a few and keep an eye on the speed of your WordPress blog.
You should also check out the preloading Flying Pages plugin. It preloads your internal web pages without affecting server performance. Also, there is a new plugin called Perfmatters on the block which you might want to check out. Read more in our full Permatters Review.
If this post helped you, do share it on Facebook or Twitter and I would love to hear your comments down here.
Durgesh Kumar
Awesome list of plugins Aayush,
Async java script and WP Rocket plugins are doing good for me
Aayush Bhaskar
Great To Hear that. WP Rocket is an absolute beast for cache and async javascript wins the page speed tests with above 80% boost in speed on an average.
Ray
Mostly good list but not Sucuri. It is horrible for speed, lot of bloat code. If you have good security in your Apache or Nginx config so you don’t need Sucuri. And you can also use Cloudflare which is also free.
You can disable many junk codes from WordPress use some plugin like Speed Demon
And force convert your Mysql tables from MyISAM to be InnoDb helps a lot
Damon Moats
Hey Aayush it is Great! here I would like to share another tutorial for manually setting up WordPress lazy loading through a plugin on: https://www.wpblog.com/add-lazy-loading-wordpress-manually-and-plugin/ I found it very easy to follow. I hope others will find it helpful too.
Aayush Bhaskar
Thanks for making this post more helpful for all the WordPress users.