WordPress is one of the most successful content management systems on the internet. It is used constantly by businesses and individuals to build and manage websites offering news, data services, and E-commerce products.
Despite all the work that developers or businesses invest in developing intelligence and multifaceted WordPress websites, there is something that can inescapably exhaust user experience: website speed and its loading time for some specific page transmission.
This article will comprehensively guide how WordPress users can accelerate websites by leveraging the speed and performance optimization plugins in WordPress.
Here are a few generalizations about why you want your website to load in under 3-4 seconds:
53% of smartphone users bounce back if the website takes longer than three seconds to load. Upwards of 87% of cats are rejected if the load time is two seconds or more. 79% of users who have a terrible experience with a website are less likely to buy or visit again.
For getting better and optimum results, first, you need to test your site speed and
Performance. How to do that?
Here are some recommended options for examining your website load speed.
- Load Impact
- Google Page Speed
- GTmetrix
- Web Page Test
Top Five WordPress Plugins for Site Optimization
W3 – Total Cache
W-3 Total Cache is a highly favored and top-of-the-list plugin amongst website developers and the WordPress community. This high-level plugin intensifies website performance by decreasing page loading rates considerably via leveraging the CDN alliance. It also ends in enhanced SEO and user experience. Because of its advantages, this free-to-use plugin is adopted by millions of website owners globally.
There are more than 2 million current installations. And, based on 1,254 reviews, the rating this plugin enjoys is 4.3 out of 5 stars.
Advantages:
Free, Made by Automattic, the group qualified for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Jetpack, easy to use, immediate and lasting results,
WP Super Minify
It is evident that data with compressed sizes will load quicker. WP Super Minify accommodates to speed up page loading by connecting, minifying, and concealing the HTML, inline CSS, and JavaScript repositories. It provides efficient results with a promising and measurable outcome.
According to the latest reports, this plugin has 10,000 + active installations and 4 out of 5 stars to its credit based on 50 reviews.
Advantages:
Free, Minification, Simple, three-step installation, not harmful to the site
WP Smush
Images play a vital role in presenting content more meaningful and appealing. They are an essential part of websites, especially in recent years when the turnaround time of a typical user is very low. Conversely, higher resolution images tend to have bigger file sizes that directly impact the website speed and load time. WP smush is an award-winning plugin known for image compression. It helps decrease the overall size of images without dropping their visual quality.
With more than 1 million active installations, this plugin has earned 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 5253 reviews.
Advantages:
Free, reduces the overall size of all images without degrading integrity or quality, supports all standard image formats, like JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load is a popular and unique WordPress plugin that enhances site loading times by lazy loading images and iframes. This plugin substitutes all your post icons, post thumbnails, gravatar perceptions, and content iframes with a placeholder. Then, it loads the content as it goes close to access the browser pane while the user scrolls the screen. It helps indirectly enhance the user turnaround time on the screen, as it is designed to serve what the user wants.
Data says this plugin has more than 80,000 active installations. In 88 reviews, users have given it 4.2 out of 5 stars.
Advantages:
Lazy loading, Increases user interaction
Autoptimize: Script Optimization
The Autoptimize WordPress optimization plugin is a preferred plugin that is available free of cost. It optimizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It also involves optimization features targeted at additional perspectives of modern WordPress sites. It helps optimize the code base and pre-compile it precisely for the compiler to parse it via web browsers and search engines.
It has 1+ million active installations and has been ranked in 1,145 reviews as 4.7 out of 5 stars.
Advantages:
Free, minification, the concatenation of the codebase, defers some scripts, lazy load images, toggle some primary scripts on and off.
Proven Outcomes of Above WordPress Plugin
Many famous and big websites used the above speed optimization plugins to ensure their performance and speed to serve a large user-base. For example, a famous website, Kreditvergleich-beantragen.ch is the Credit Loan provider in Switzerland. Through this website, an individual can apply for a Credit Loan from CHF 5000 to CHF 250,000 with low interest. A similar example you can also refer to the health insurance comparison website in Switzerland. These plugins are for speed and performance optimization without any security or technical intimidation. The outcomes are compelling, and they improve day by day with new updates.
Conclusion
There are plenty of options available in the market and rapidly coming each day, but the stats say that most of them are worthless and only harm your site by slowing it down and savoring the memory. After deep analysis, the plugins described here are the most suitable and effective ones and can help you derive benefits and boost your slow and unresponsive site.
