Transform a simple WordPress site into a cutting-edge top performing powerhouse. WordPress plugins not only allow you to add great features and functionality to your website, but also speeds it up. Speeding up your website creates a better user experience. Here are 6 plugins recommended to help ramp up your website’s speed: 

1. AMP

Back in 2015 Google updated their search engine to award websites with good speed and is still in effect today. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source project developed by Google to instantly load content for mobile users, allowing web content to load faster on mobile devices. It transforms your website layout and strips it down to the core essentials. 

The AMP plugin also allows you to automatically generate the AMP markup while writing content. This markup is executed automatically when mobile users visit your website.

Installing AMP is important for growing your search presence.

Additional benefits of the AMP WordPress plugin include:

• Develop components that are compatible with AMP.
• Auto-generate AMP markup for your website screens. This will allow you to markup your website for AMP without changing your standard workflow.
• Take advantage of mobile redirection and AMP-AMP linking.

 

2. Smush 

Smush is the most popular image compression plugin in the WordPress plugin marketplace. This plugin can bulk compress images, automatically compress new images, and enable lazy loading. Smush comes with both free and paid plans. The free plan allows you to compress all the new images you upload. It can also bulk compress existing images, but there is a limit to the number of images you can compress in one go. The tool works in the background to take care of all your website’s artwork. Smush can also resize website images and look for incorrectly sized pictures.

More benefits of using Smush for your WordPress website:

• Compress images without losing quality. Smush strips away redundant data from images without hurting their quality.
• Deferred rendering of off-screen images with lazy loading.
• Bulk compress existing images on your WordPress website. You can also compress images that are not in your media library.
• Optimize as many images as you like with the free plan. You can only compress images that are below 5 MB in size.

 

3. WP Rocket 

WP Rocket is a premium plugin and is not available for free in the WordPress marketplace. You’ll have to purchase WP Rocket, download the plugin, and install it on your WordPress website. Once the plugin is active, you can choose from a variety of performance practices to speed up your website. This includes caching, image compression, minification, gzip compression, and more. The tool is specially designed for WordPress websites. 

Features as part of the plugin:

• Cache your website pages in no time to get an optimized load time.
• Compress website assets on your server and decompress them on the website to improve server response time.
• Cache website assets which include HTML, CSS, and JS files.
• Integrate a CDN to your website to make sure it loads fast anywhere in the world.
• Clean up redundant data in your website server like spam comments, pingbacks, and more.

 

4. W3 Total Cache 

With W3 Total Cache you can use the plugin to cache your website assets and reduce load time.

You can also integrate a CDN to your website using W3 Total Cache to shave off more seconds from your load time. The plugin improves your website server’s response time, enabling you to manage more visitors to your site with greater ease.

Advantages of using W3 Total Cache:

• Minification of JS, CSS and HTML files with the plugin can help you save 80% of your server bandwidth
• Support for AMP to make mobile viewing faster and easier.
• Compatible with shared, managed, and dedicated website hosts.
• Caching of minified and compressed CSS and JS files in memory, disk, or CDN.
• Caching of website assets like categories, search results, tags, comments, and more.
• Lazy loading functionality to defer loading of off-screen images.
• Security mechanisms to bring the site up to standard security levels.
• Data that details caching metrics, and the performance of other enabled features.

 

5. Cloudflare 

Cloudflare is the most trusted solution out there for website security and performance optimization. Once your website is connected, Cloudflare can instantly shore up your site speed with Automatical Performance Optimization (APO).

APO enables you to host your website on Cloudflare’s cutting-edge servers, allowing you to deliver fast speeds to users anywhere in the world. Even without APO, you can still get automated cache purge features for your website. Your visitors will always see the updated static content when they arrive on your website.

Additional benefits of using Cloudflare:

• Manage your CloudFlare account settings within your website’s admin panel. You can choose from options to purge cache, manage security levels, optimize images, and more.
• Support for HTTP2.
• CDN integration to ensure your website runs fast everywhere in the world.
• Best-in-class security standards with WAF rules.

 

6. WP Optimize 

WP Optimize is a powerful plugin that caches your website and streamlines your database. This is to make your website fast and SEO-friendly. This feature alone comes loaded with functionality like pre-loaded cache, device-responsive caching, gzip compression, and more.

Other functionalities of the plugin include database optimization and image compression. 

More reasons to use WP Optimize:

• Remove redundant data from your WordPress database like pingbacks, trackbacks, spam comments, and more.
• Defragment SQL tables on your server.
• Automatic database cleanups.
• Bulk compression of your website’s images. You can restore your compressed images to their original quality as well.
• Multi-pass lossy compression algorithm to double your compression rate without losing as much in quality.
• Advanced caching rules to choose which website assets you wish to cache.

Start building a website with these plugins today! Call 248.528.3600.