Do you want to speed up your WordPress website? Pages that load quickly improve the user experience, increase visits to our page and help SEO positioning.
In this article, Money Week India shares the most useful WordPress optimization plugins to speed up your website.
First of all, we give you some basic notions about the most efficient tool when it comes to optimizing any website: the cache.
WHAT IS THE CACHE?
The cache is data temporarily stored for quick access. In computers, information is usually stored on a hard drive. When access to a website is “requested” or what is the same, we try to load it in the browser, a computer needs to execute several processes before being able to present the information.
Caching solves this problem by processing frequently requested information and then storing it in memory. This allows computers to access the file quickly.
WHY IS CACHE IMPORTANT?
Caching is important because it reduces server load and makes our website run faster. It is proven that when a website loads quickly, the user tends to continue visiting the same site and also spends more time on it.
To ensure that our WordPress site is properly optimized, we will need to use, part of the cache, plugins that offer an increase in loading speed; so we have made a list with the best plugins to achieve it. Let’s start!
Note: It is advisable to make a backup of our site’s files and database before installing any plugin that modifies the way WordPress works.
1. Database Optimization: WP-Optimize
This database optimization plugin cleans up unnecessary tables and records that cause access to information to slow down.
WP-Optimize will help you:
- Free up space in your database: Deleting reviews of old posts, comments that have been marked as spam…
- Receive exact information about which tables are affected by optimization, making it easy to track the status of your database.
- Keep up the speed: You will be able to establish scheduled maintenance of your choice, performing the optimization automatically without having to worry.
Once the plugin is installed, we can access its configuration through the WordPress administration interface, within general settings.
Within the optimization options, we can select a list of processes to optimize, such as removing reviews from blog posts, or cleaning comments marked as spam.
2. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the most famous caching plugins. It has basic options for quick optimization of our site, as well as complex features for more advanced users.
Among its main advantages, we find the option to implement gzip compression, caching of pages and objects, support for CDN, and code minification.
3. Auto-optimize
Any plugin or theme that we install in our WordPress will add JavaScript and CSS code to the front-end for its operation. Loading this code can cause the page to take longer to render.
To improve the score in tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, we will have to delay the loading of certain scripts and CSS code so that the rendering is generated quickly without interference.
The Autoptimize plugin does a great job here as it detects which scripts are slowing down the initial page load and delays them. This relieves the bottleneck that can arise if all scripts are executed simultaneously when visiting our site.
4. WP SuperCache
WP Super Cache is a popular caching plugin for WordPress. It stands out for being free and highly recommended by important hosting companies specialized in WordPress.
It includes the most important features to optimize the speed of our sites, such as gzip compression, preloading of cached files, CDN support, and more.
It’s easy to install and configure, making it a good option for those who don’t want to get too complicated and get results quickly.
5. reSmush.it Image Optimizer
We finish our selection of plugins with reSmush.it, a plugin that compresses the images of our WordPress so that they take up less space without losing quality, achieving faster loading speed.
This plugin makes use of a free API that reduces the size of images (JPEG, PNG and GIF) up to 5MB. Thanks to this API, every time we upload a new image to our server, its weight will be automatically reduced.
It includes the option to perform a massive optimization of the images that are already on our server so that the old entries or pages of our site benefit from said compression.
We hope that this article has been useful to you when choosing plugins to improve the speed of your WordPress website.
Remember to measure the results obtained after optimization using the PageSpeed Insights tool and leave us a comment if you have any questions about the process!
