For a better user experience website needs smoothness with speed.
Hence, the WordPress plugin is important for speeding up your WordPress website.
Because the loading speed affects the users and overall website engagement.
First, let’s see the importance of website speed.
Why It’s important to speed up your WordPress website?
It is an important factor for both the WordPress website and users because the website speed directly affects the user experience.
- A slow-loading page increases the bounce rate. Hence, the user shows a negative response to the website.
- It also affects the conversion rate in e-commerce websites. And the good website speed increases SEO rankings and conversion rate.
You can check your website speed in PageSpeed Insights.
Ideally, the page speed should be less than 3 seconds to help users for better engagement.
That’s why fast loading is important for your website.
How do plugins help your WordPress website speed?
The below features help to optimize your WordPress website for better speed.
Effective Caching
Cache helps websites to load frequently and faster. It stores data temporarily and helps WordPress to continuously retrieve data from the database.
Lazy Loading
This feature is very useful for providing better page loading speed. It only loads the page content that is being viewed by the users. Because the entire page takes a long time to load.
Image optimization
It delivers high-quality images in perfect size and resolution for better engagement. Websites need to optimize their content images because large size images take time to load and decrease the overall page load time.
Minification
Minification is highly effective and the main method to increase website speed.
It’s the process to minify the code and markup in your script file. It removes unnecessary content from HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.
WordPress Database Optimization
By improving and repairing the database of WordPress increase the search engine rankings and website speed. If the database optimization isn’t perfectly done then it’ll affect the overall performance of the website and user experience.
WordPress plugins for speed up your website:
There are so many plugins available but here are some of the best WordPress plugins to speed up your WordPress website.
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is highly recommended by WordPress experts and it’s a powerful plugin for cache and website speed.
It improves your website performance easily with perfect practices.
Pros:
- WP Rocket automatically runs 80% of web performance best practices
- It’s beginner-friendly
- Crawler fetches pages automatically to build up the cache
- It provides other important features like lazy loading, CDN support, minify and more.
Cons:
- It’s not free.
2. WP-Optimize
World’s fastest caching engine and the all in one WordPress plugin for better speed. In which you can compress images, optimize the database and cache.
Pros:
- You can clean and optimize the database
- Compress images
- Allows you to minify CSS and JavaScript
- Cached pages
- Pre-optimization backups
- It’s free
Cons:
- None
3. WP Smush
WP Smush is an award-winning image optimizer and the most popular among all image optimizers.
Pros:
- Free with no monthly limits
- Supports all the image formats
- Compressing image while preserving the image quality
- Saves time
- Can handle 50 images at once
- It easily detects incorrect size image
Cons:
- None
4. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a widely used script optimization plugin.
Pros:
- Free plugin
- Allows lazy-load images
- Minify and cache scripts and style
- Defers scripts
Cons:
- Sometimes it’s buggy
5. WP Super cache
WP Super Cache generates static Html files from the website and serves instead of PHP scripts to users.
Pros:
- Easily use
- It’s free
- Preload content feature
- You can set up CDN
Cons:
- None
6. ShortPixel
It is an image optimizer that provides features like resizing and compressing. Also, ShortPixel allows every format of images.
Pros:
- Fast batch automation
- Quick backups
- Image quality is preserved
- Powerful algorithms
Cons:
- It’s a paid plugin but allows you 100 images/month free.
Conclusion:
Now you easily understand why the WordPress plugin is important for speed up your WordPress website. You can see that for better user experience, SEO rankings and higher conversion rates depend on the website speed. Fast-loading websites are also a web design trend.
So, choose your WordPress plugin according to your need and tell me which one is your favourite.
