10 Powerful Plugins to Increase Website Loading Speed

Are you just finding possible ways to increase your website loading speed? Or are you in search of a minifying or caching plugin to use on WordPress? Whichever one you are looking for, this article will show you the right solution. In this post, you will be given 10 powerful plugins to increase website loading speed of your WordPress website, most are free.

You will also be shown how to make little tweaks on your website with lazy loading plugins and various other plugins.

Does your webpage load super fast for your visitors? If not, then below are powerful WordPress plugins that will help your webpage load faster.

You have devoted a lot of time and energy to building your WordPress site!! It would be shameful if a little thing could slow down your success.

What is it about?

Site Speed

If it takes your webpages longer than necessary to load, then this is a critical issue that needs to be resolved.

As a matter of fact, you have some WordPress plugins at your disposal that will help ensure you improve your page load speed. I have them listed below for you. These plugins make it possible for visitors to load pages in few seconds and keep coming back for more information.

Why Should You Optimize Your Page Speed?

Here are some reasons your site must load in 2-3 seconds:

• 79 percent of visitors who have a bad experience with a site aren’t likely to take action
• More than 87 percent of shopping carts are ignored if the page load time is longer than 3 seconds
• 53 percent of mobile visitors click away if it takes the page more than 3 seconds to load

Testing Your Page Load Speed

Here are some trending options for testing your page load speed:

• IsItWP
• Web Page Test
• Google Page Speed
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• GTMetrix
• Load Impact

How do You Make Your Webpage Load Faster?

You can do a few things to optimize your page load speed.

1. WordPress Hosting

When deciding on which hosting to use, ensure it:

• Embraces traffic levels
• Compatible with the size of your website
• Is properly configured
• Can catch up with increased traffic levels
• Operates the top trending software and hardware

Many people opt for the cheapest website hosting but you need to look at the added tools that come with your hosting such as site speed management, security, and education (lessons). My #1 recommendation is Wealthy Affiliate, where you get amazing hosting with cutting-edge technology, absolute security, great tech support, a community, and 100 video lessons. You can start today for Free and try it out, no credit card required.

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2. WordPress Website

The size of your website can impact its loading speed; so ensure you have superb optimization and proper hosting to reduce the size as much as possible without hurting quality or user experience.

3. Post Content

The homepage of your site is the first area to work on. Ensure to optimize page speed and see that it loads as fast as possible.

This will help improve the speed by only show the content excerpts in a blogroll.

4. Simplify Your WordPress Site

Focus on what matters, which is content and functionality, and ignore everything you aren’t in need of. A widget might be included because users navigate through it. So know what each widget does on your website so that you can delete any unnecessary widgets that slow down your speed. Always back up your website before experimenting. Check site speed before and after.

5. WordPress Plugins

You should only install a plugin when you need it. Plugins can slow down your site if they are:

• Not current
• Inactive
• Bloated

Each of these 10 powerful plugins to increase website speed need to be considered when you are having loading speed problems.

6. The Quality of the WordPress Theme

If a WordPress theme is poorly-coded, it will impact the:

• Number of plugins required to get the most gritty level of influence on your WordPress theme
• Security
• Page load time

How Can You Optimize Your WordPress Site with Plugins?

Plugins that optimize WordPress sites focus on numerous key features:

• HeartBeat API
• Cache
• Deferring Scripts
• Disabling or reducing Ajax
• Lazy loading
• CDNs
• Concatenation
• Minification

What is Cache About?

Caching is one of the frequently-used techniques to help get your pages to load faster. It is a process that leads to improved performance and faster WordPress sites.

Cache means data that is tentatively stored for immediate access when requested. It often takes the computer a couple of processes to retrieve data and make it accessible.

Cache ensures to speed up this process by storing the most frequently-accessed data in tentative storage. And a WordPress site can do this perfectly.

WordPress is an integrated CMS (content management system), meaning that for every visit to a WordPress site, data must pass through a database and it’s required to perform numerous functions as WordPress loads on your browser.

What great functionality! WordPress can skip many of these processes by memorizing the page after the first visit and then ensure to use that page for subsequent visits.

This process can significantly boost page speed optimization. And this is why most WordPress plugins run cache.

HeartBeat API

Heartbeat API is the automated simple server polling API in WordPress. It helps in keeping your Ajax at an appreciable amount and saving you extra CPU usage. It gives room for real-time frontend updates.

What is Ajax?

In simple terms, Ajax is designed to update a section of a page without having to reload the whole page. It’s useful but can exhaust your CPU.

Deferring Scripts

Deferring scripts simply means loading your JavaScript or CSS files fast so your users can access your site faster.

What is CDN About?

Your Content Delivery Network is an integrated network of numerous servers that are distributed around a targeted location for the sole aim of distributing content faster based on the nearest server at a point in time.

What Is Minification?

Minification reduces the page load time by getting rid of superfluous content and redundancies in:

• CSS files
• JavaScript files
• HTML files

Lazy Loading

This is a WordPress plugin that seamlessly loads only a section of your page being viewed by a user at a specific point in time rather than loading the entire webpage all at once.

What Is Concatenation?

Concatenation is the practice of merging different files into a single file to reduce the number of HTTP requests sent in.

If you use any of the tips in this article, you will stop losing customers, subscribers, and viewers because of the slow load time of your pages.

Very Useful WordPress Plugins for Optimizing Your Site Speed

These are my picks for the 10 powerful plugins to increase website loading speed:

1. Lazy Load Rocket
2. WP Smush
3. WP Super Minifying
4. Total Cashe of W3
5. WP Super Cache
6. Cache Enabler
7. WP Fastest Cache
8. Nitro Package
9. WP Rocket

1. Lazy Load Rocket

When choosing a plugin, this is one you should really consider. When an audience is loading a page on your site, it might cause your website to load the entire page and this isn’t good for SEO because it will take a longer time to load.

If the page happens to be a long one and also has a lot of images, it will take a much longer period for that page to load completely. Your site doesn’t necessarily need to load the entire page, and this is where WP Rocket lazy load comes in; this feature will only load specific characters when they are needed.

The WP lazy load rocket is completely free to use.

Its features:

• It is very lightweight and so it doesn’t use Javascript or jQuery
• It chooses the best images and thumbnails on your posts to load first using the Alt definition.

2. WP Smush

Most times, the tools used on your page appear in degraded quality because they use weak formats. But with the WP Smush, you will not be able to detect any loss in quality because it uses strong and lasting formats.

The plugin is very useful for removing unneeded bytes from the files containing your images; it can also be useful in optimizing images. This plugin is free to use.

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These are some of its features you might find useful.

• You can decide to run existing images through the plugin
• It removes colors that are not useful from your images
• It enhances jpeg compression
• Frees JPEGs of their metadata.

3. WP Super Minifying

The features of this plugin allow you to disable CSS and JavaScript temporarily or permanently, just in case there is a conflict.

The reason it is called minifying is that it combines the files of these coding programs and also compresses them in order to reduce the time taken by your site to load. It is free to use.

These are its features:

• You can disable compression of JavaScript or CSS
• It is easy to use
• It reduces the files of CSS, HTML, and so on.

4. Total Cache of W3

This plugin might be difficult to use by inexperienced people who are not advanced. Because it contains so many options that might make it very complex to setup. It has advanced support for Cloudflare and other CDN services. It is free to use.

Here are its features:

• It can minify
• Performs browser and database caching
• It supports CDN.

5. WP Super Cache

This particular plugin has some settings for advanced users, but it is also easy and straightforward to set up, it is one of the world’s most popularly used caching plugins and it is free to use.

Its features are as follows:

• Cache preload
• Serves static HTML files
• Allows multiple caching types

6. Cache Enabler

This is a plugin that is considered to be very good and user-friendly. A light-weight caching plugin and can be set up in a short period of time.

It allows you to set up cache minification, cache expiry time, and a few others. It is free to use.

Some of its features are:

• Setting expiration period
• Minification feature
• Clear cache in 1-click
• Simple and easy setup
• Set post ID’s to be excluded from cache.

7. WP Fastest Cache

As the name implies, the WP fastest cache is a quick and easy-to-use performance plugin whose main focus is on caching.

Unlike some other plugins that are too advanced or too basic, this plugin comes with a great set of features that make it easy to use. The WP fastest cache is free, but to get extra features, you can upgrade to the premium version.

Its features are:

• Minify CSS and HTML
• Clear cache in 1-click
• Easy setup
• CDN integration.

8. Nitro Package

Referred to as a total speed optimization platform, it is an all-in-one plugin; what you have to do is choose how aggressive you want your optimization to be and then add your website accompanied with an installed connector plugin.

This platform was created to make the process of enhancing the speed of your website easy; to get more performance from it, you can customize your own settings.

It can be free to use when it comes to smaller sites, but for better resources and features, the paid plan will be necessary.

Its features are as follows:

• Defers JS loading
• Automatic website optimization
• Turns images to next-gen formats
• Automatic image enhancement

9. Performatters

This plugin allows you to disable certain options that slow down the performance of your site and are also not needed. It has different features that can be used to boost your page speed by up to 50%.

You can get this plugin for $19 a year.

Its features are as follows:

• Rest API control
• Preconnect and DNS prefetch is being supported
• It disables WordPress options that are slowing down your site
• Heartbeat control.

10. WP Rocket

This is arguably the best performance plugin you can lay your hands on; that is why it was saved for the last. It has a very user-friendly interface and also has the ability to delay JavaScript execution time in order to boost the load time of pages.

You can get this plugin for $49.99 a year.

Features that might interest you are:

• Image lazy loading
• Setting import and export
• Delayed JavaScript execution time
• CDN integration
• Cache preload.

My Standpoint

You clicked on this topic because you have troubles optimizing the speed of your WordPress site; so choosing one of these plugins will have a great impact on your page load time, but while you consider using any of them, have it at the back of your mind that having too many of them might be harmful to your site.

Improving the speed performance of your site can help boost your ranking, as Page Speed is now one of the most crucial ranking signals in the Google Search Algorithm.

Conclusion

Creating and adding at least 5 quality articles to your website per week should be your goal but if you don’t optimize your website then you will lose viewers because of slow loading. Aim for under 3 seconds loading by trying one plugin at a time if you have troubles. Try to narrow down the problem before choosing which plugin may solve the problem.

Don’t be deterred by the technology, each one of these 10 powerful plugins to increase the website loading speed of your website is designed to help you beat the speed problem and most are free.

I hope this has helped, please leave a comment, like, and share. Thank you.

LILY