The Best Plugins to Speed Up WordPress
January 12, 2023 | By David Selden-Treiman | Filed in: Hosting Speed, Web Design, WordPress.TLDR
Caching plugins store frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area to reduce load time, optimization plugins reduce the size of files and eliminates unnecessary elements, and lazy loading plugins defer the loading of certain elements until they are needed. By using a combination of these plugins and properly configuring them, it is possible to significantly improve the speed of a WordPress website and enhance the user experience.
Introduction
The speed of your website is crucial for maintaining a good user experience. When a website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to become frustrated and navigate away from the page. This can lead to a high bounce rate, which can negatively impact the success of your website. One way to improve the speed of a WordPress website is by using plugins. In this article, we will discuss several types of plugins that can be used to speed up a WordPress theme, including caching, optimization, and lazy loading plugins. We will also provide tips for configuring these plugins to get the best results.
Caching Plugins
Caching is a way of storing frequently accessed data in a temporary storage area, so that it can be quickly retrieved the next time it is needed. This can significantly improve the speed of a website by reducing the amount of time it takes for a page to load. There are several types of caching that can be used to improve the speed of a WordPress website, including page caching, database caching, and object caching.
Some Popular File Caching Plugins
Popular file caching plugins for WordPress include:
- WP Super Cache: This plugin creates static HTML files of your pages and posts, which are then served to users instead of the more resource-intensive PHP scripts. This can greatly reduce the load time of your website.
- W3 Total Cache: This plugin allows you to enable a variety of caching options, including page caching, object caching, and browser caching. It also includes options for minifying and combining CSS and JavaScript files to reduce the size of your pages.
- WP Fastest Cache: This plugin creates static HTML files of your pages and posts, similar to WP Super Cache. It also includes options for minifying and combining CSS and JavaScript files, as well as lazy loading images to improve speed.
Tips for configuring file caching plugins
- If your server supports gzip compression, save your files pre-compressed to reduce the load on your server.
- The best cache age in our experience is between 1 and 6 hours before a cache refresh.
- Make sure your content is actually loading after changing a configuration on the caching plugin. It seems silly, but small errors can easily find their way into your cache configuration.
- Keep an eye on your server load to make sure that the resources you need cached are actually cached properly. Not all resources are going to be saved, so keep this in mind.
- Make sure that your load times are actually sped up. Sometimes, file caching plugins can slow your site down, especially if your hosting provider already has file caching enabled for your site.
Optimization Plugins
Optimization refers to the process of improving the performance of a website by reducing the size of files and eliminating unnecessary elements. This can help to improve the speed of a website by reducing the amount of data that needs to be loaded by the browser. The most commonly helpful optimizations include image size reduction and JavaScript and CSS minification.
Popular WordPress Optimization Plugins
Popular optimization plugins for WordPress include:
- Autoptimize: This plugin minifies and combines CSS and JavaScript files, as well as optimizes your website’s HTML code to reduce its size. It also includes options for lazy loading images to improve speed.
- ShortPixel: This plugin optimizes your website’s images by compressing them to reduce their size. It also includes options for optimizing other media files, such as PDFs and videos.
Tips for configuring optimization plugins
- It sounds silly, but make absolutely certain that your site is backed up before using any of these optimization plugins. If you need to revert changes, it’s very helpful to have a full backup of your site you can restore to.
- Be careful not to optimize your website too aggressively, as this can negatively impact its appearance or functionality.
- Understand what the settings are doing before going in and activating all of the options. Not all are necessary or will even help all websites.
- Regularly check your website’s appearance and functionality after applying optimization to ensure that everything is working as intended.
Lazy Loading Plugins
Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of certain elements on a webpage until they are needed. This can improve the speed of a website by reducing the amount of data that needs to be loaded upfront. Lazy loading is particularly useful for websites with a lot of images or other media, as it allows the initial content to be loaded quickly, with the rest being loaded as the user scrolls down the page.
Popular WordPress Lazy-Loading Pluigns
Popular lazy loading plugins for WordPress include:
- a3 Lazy Load: This plugin allows you to lazy load images, videos, and iframes, as well as customize the loading placeholder and effect. It also includes options for optimizing the loading of comments and WooCommerce product images.
- Rocket Lazy Load: This plugin lazy loads images, iframes, and videos, and includes options for customizing the loading placeholder and effect. It also includes integration with the popular WPBakery Page Builder plugin.
Tips for configuring lazy loading plugins
- Make sure your website’s resources (images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) are loading by the time they are needed. If your visitors scroll down and the resources aren’t there yet, it’s almost as bad as the resources not existing to begin with.
- Make sure the changes actually speed up your site. Browsers will often delay the loading of resources further down the page, so you may not need to implement lazy loading at all.
- The biggest improvements from lazy-loading will be sites with a large number of images on pages with a lot of scrolling.
- Be sure to check your site on other devices and slower internet connections to see what effects your changes have. Lazy loading may work great on fast connections, but give a degraded site experience on slower ones.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed several types of plugins that can be used to speed up a WordPress theme, including caching, optimization, and lazy loading plugins. By using these plugins in conjunction, it is possible to significantly improve the speed of a WordPress website and enhance the user experience.
It is important to regularly test and monitor the speed of your website to ensure that it is performing at its best. This can be done using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GT Metrics, or Pingdom Website Speed Test. By keeping an eye on your website’s speed, you can identify areas that need improvement and make necessary changes using the plugins discussed in this article.
Overall, using plugins to speed up your WordPress theme is a simple and effective way to improve the performance of your website. By choosing the right combination of plugins and properly configuring them, you can significantly enhance the user experience and improve the success of your website.
Need Help Speeding Up Your Site?
David Selden-Treiman is Director of Operations and a project manager at Potent Pages. He specializes in custom web crawler development, website optimization, server management, web application development, and custom programming. Working at Potent Pages since 2012 and programming since 2003, David has extensive expertise solving problems using programming for dozens of clients. He also has extensive experience managing and optimizing servers, managing dozens of servers for both Potent Pages and other clients.
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