WordPress is one of the widely used CMS in the world comprising 30% of world’s websites. However, it’s pretty slow in default configuration, especially if the site has lots of visitors and heavy content. Sometimes it may get pretty slow when you start adding Plugins and themes.
On the other hand, the speed of your website is extremely important for two reasons. These days, visitors gets frustrated even if it does not load within milliseconds. A site that loads slowly will lose visitors and potential revenues. Since 2010, Google has been using page load times as a factor in its search algorithms to rank more lightweight websites higher than slow loading sites. So, if you are not ready yet to make your site faster then be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Unlike other “X best Plugin lists, this article is a comprehensive guide to WordPress performance optimization. We include everything from how to check your WordPress website speed, why speed is important, what slows down your WordPress site and list of plugins that are essential to speed up your WordPress sites.
Well, let’s start with “How to check speed of your WordPress websites”:
Sometimes website owners think that their website is doing well as it does not slow down on their computer. But thinking that way, is going to be a huge mistake.
However, other users who are visiting your website for the first time may not get the same experience. That’s why, we recommend that you should test your website frequently using some popular tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom etc. These are free online tool that allows you to test your website’s speed from different locations.
You can check some of the speed test tools by checking below mentioned URLs.
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
http://webpagetest.org/
http://gtmetrix.com/
What Slows Down Your WordPress Website?
After getting the speed test report, you will likely get some recommendations to improve your website speed. However, most of that are full of technical glitch which is difficult for someone who does not have any technical knowledge. Understanding the reasons of slowing down is an important factor to increase performance of WordPress website. The primary causes for a slow WordPress website are Web Hosting, WordPress Configuration, Page Size, Bad Plugins, External scripts etc.
Why speed is important:
Studies found that people will only wait seven seconds for your website to load before clicking the back button. It means a lot if you are a website owner and giving service to a large number of people. So, a slow website means people will leave your website even before it loads. As I already mentioned, search engines including google have already started downgrading slower websites by pushing them down in the search results which means lower traffic for slow websites. If you want to generate more traffic, subscribers and revenue from your website, then you must make your WordPress website faster. Now let’s move on to the main topic of our discussion. How can you increase website performance using some of the best plugins of current market? Below are the plugins you can use to speed up your website performance greatly in different ways.
W3 Total Cache:
W3 Total Cache is the best plugin over others with 1 million+ active downloads. This popular plugin significantly improves the SEO and user experience of websites by increasing the performance, reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration. Some of the benefits of using this plugin are: improvement in search engine results, at least 10x improvement of site performance, upto 80% bandwidth savings etc.
WP Super Cache:
This WP WordPress plugin creates static pages of your site which reduces the page serving time. In turn, loading time will increase significantly without maintaining the page cache. The WP Super Cache WordPress plugin is one such plugins that helps you to optimize your database by generating static HTML files. This is how, when any page is requested from your blog, static pages will be served instead of processing all of the PHP scripts.
WP Fastest Cache:
If you are looking to boost up your site by increasing loading time, than WP Fastest Cache can be your best choice. Its design and feature set is simple and functional, but it gets the job done without any difficulty. It has chosen more than 400k website owners. This WordPress plugin can increase your site performance up to 5x times.
WP Smush.it:
If your site having a lot of images and don’t know how to compress them without compromising with quality, than this could be your game changer. After you install and activate this plugin, and upload images, it will be compressed automatically. The feature: compresses all old images on your WordPress image folder is very helpful in reducing your load time for older posts.
EWWW Image Optimizer:
This WordPress plugin can be used alternately with WP Smush.it. The EWWW Image Optimizer can increase your blog speed significantly by optimizing uploaded images. With the increase of speed optimization, your website or blog can rank better in search engines. In addition, it will also save you storage space and bandwidth. While EWWW Image optimizer will automatically optimize your new and uploaded images, it will optionally convert your images to the best file format.
Some of the unique features of this plugin are: No Speed Limits,Smooth Handling, High Torque, SSL encrypted, Supports Every File Format, Free Backup Store etc.
If you are looking to improve overall site performance, than we would recommend to use some of these techniques mentioned above. We hope that you will definitely get lots of improvement of your site performance. That’s it! We hope this article helped you learn some of the useful tricks to speed up WordPress site and boost overall performance. Be sure to test your site’s speed before and after, and let us know your results in the comment section. Stay tuned for our next article.
