5 website Performance Plugins for WordPress
Everyone wants a fast website. Customers and search engines all take notice of how it longs to load your website. If it's not a blazingly fast website then people will leave and the search engines won't send you the traffic that you need to grow your audience.
With the help of WordPress plugins, you can get some help in speeding up your website. Remember, there are a number of factors that determine the speed of your website, the plugins listed below will help.
Terminology to help you understand what Website Performance WP Plugins do:
- Minify - removes unnecessary code such as comments and spaces
- Compress - make the files smaller
- Add expires headers - tell the browser how long to keep a copy of a specific file in cache reducing the number of requests to the server
- AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages - pages optimized for mobile devices and faster load times
- SSL - Secure Socket Layer - a protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network
- Caching - Storing the content for quicker load time
- CDN - Content Delivery Network - a third-party site to host page caching
Autoptimize
The Autoptimize plugin helps improve the performance of any WordPress site by combining all scripts and styles. It then minifies them and compresses them. It also has the option to add expires headers, caches the scripts and styles, and minifies any HTML code.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images, optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more.
WP Performance Pack
The WP Performance Pack easily allows you to perform tasks to increase the speed and performance of your WordPress site. With this plugin you can disable specific WordPress features such as automatic scaling of large images, disabling Emoji support, and removing header elements. The plugin will also dynamically resize images, offers CDN support, and disable default widgets.
WP Performance Pack
WP Performance Pack is your first choice for speeding up WordPress core the easy way, no core patching required. It features options to improve localization performance and image handling (faster upload, reduced webspace usage).
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a very popular WordPress plugin that can help increase the speed of your website and improve the user experience. The plugin has a lot of features and options and can be overwhelming at first. It has support for AMP and SSL, caching of pages, posts, CSS, stylesheets, JavaScript, feeds, and database objects.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
Flying Pages
The Flying Pages plugin is a little different because it preloads pages fora quicker page load. The plugin looks for links on the page to preload them for future clicks. You can limit the number of pages it preloads to help prevent server overloads.
Flying Pages
Flying Pages injects a tiny JavaScript code (1KB gzipped), waits until the browser becomes idle. Then it detects pages in the viewport and on mouse hover and preloads them.
Flying Pages is intelligent to make sure preloading doesn’t crash your server or make it slow.
Asset Cleanup
The Asset Cleanup plugin scans your pages and detects which scripts and stylesheets are being loaded. When you edit a post or page, you can disable specific scripts and stylesheets to reduce load time and speed up your website. This reduces the number of HTTP requests for pages the scripts and styles not being used.
A lot of the options in the performance plugins can be confusing. Do your research and remember you can get professional help if needed.
My final tip around website performance WP plugins is to backup your site before installing and activating the plugin of your choice.