With more than 521 million websites powered by WordPress, the platform is undoubtedly the most widely used by developers, novices, and everybody in between. These sites, representing everything from e-commerce stores to blogs, attract millions of visitors daily, prompting developers to improve the sites’ functionality and user experience continuously.
The core of this experience is the speed at which a site loads. Slower websites can cause frustration and quickly lead visitors to find an alternative. Conversely, faster loading options encourage more engagement and exploration by visitors as they navigate deeper to see what the site has to offer.
Speed isn’t simply a function of how much data is on a page. Content-heavy sites like Casinos.com may have a large amount of data to display but still load quickly, while other sites with less information take longer. This is due to numerous factors, ranging from caching to image optimization.
Let’s look at the 10 best WordPress plugins that will help speed up your site and are essential for ensuring the best user experience. We’ve grouped these plugins according to functionality and will cover page caching and image, code, and database optimization.
Caching Plugins
Caching, or the process of storing parts of a website to reduce loading times, is one of the easiest and most effective ways to speed up a website. Numerous plugins are available to aid in this process and help boost loading times.
WP Super Cache
Developed by Automattic, WP Super Cache creates a static HTML file of each of your WordPress site’s dynamic pages. Using an intelligent delivery system, these static files are then shown to visitors rather than the original file loaded with PHP scripts. As such, pages load significantly faster and provide a more streamlined experience when navigating.
LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is a multi-use plugin that goes beyond simple caching to offer image optimization, lazy load, and more. However, at its core, the plugin works to offer server-level caching of web pages to ensure information downloaded by visitors is as small as possible, leading to lightning-fast speeds for even more complex sites like e-commerce options.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is also an all-in-one plugin that comes with various other site optimization features. For caching, however, the plugin excels by offering page and browser caching and cache preloading. This means that all changes or updates to existing pages are preloaded to the cache database immediately to ensure that a visitor never receives old information.
Image Optimization Plugins
Images are often among the most data-heavy parts of a webpage. As such, it is crucial to optimize them to be as small as possible while retaining their integrity and sharpness. The following plugins do this exceptionally well.
Imagify
Developed by the owners of WP Rocket, WP Media, Imagify is one of the highest-rated lossy image optimizers. Key to its success is its ability to convert images from regular formats (PNG, JPEG, SVG) to new-age, smaller formats like AVIF and Webp. These conversions save plenty of space and help make page images appear at blinding rates.
Smush Image Optimization
Another plugin known for image optimization with an option for lossy compression is Smush Image Optimization, though it defaults to lossless methods to preserve quality. It acts as an all-in-one agent to compress, resize, and optimize images and as a converter to change pictures into newer formats. The plugin is also known for its ability to load images lazily and significantly lower page loading speeds.
EWWW Image Optimizer
Despite its strange name, EWWW is one of the best image optimizers that offers zero speed limits and an unlimited file size threshold. The plugin also features intelligence to determine the right image format for various uses, resulting in every image on your site receiving a personal optimization rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Database Optimization Plugins
Databases are central to how WordPress operates, stores, and retrieves information on a website. Unruly databases with thousands of no longer used data points can significantly slow down a site and frustrate visitors. The following plugins ensure that this isn’t a problem:
WP-Optimize
Also marketed as a caching optimizer, WP-Optimizer seems to do it all. In addition to caching pages and compressing images, the plugin uses an intelligent algorithm to quickly identify parts of your database that are no longer needed and remove them. It also cleans up the remaining data to ensure that information can quickly be retrieved whenever the database is accessed.
Advanced Database Cleaner
Developed by Younes JFR specifically for database management, Advanced Database Cleaner can delete old revisions of posts and pages, auto drafts, trash, spam comments, pingbacks, trackbacks, orphan information, and expired transients—just to name a few. It can also schedule automatic database cleanses and optimize tables to ensure that databases run smoothly.
Code Optimization Plugins
Code optimization, or minifying code, has become increasingly popular. By combing through CSS and JavaScript files, plugins designed to minify can remove duplicate code and remove anything non-essential to help reduce file sizes and improve loading times. The best plugins to minify code include:
Autoptimize
Autoptimize does precisely what its name implies and makes optimizing a website simple. The plugin works to minify not only serve pages but those cached by other plugins. It also uses CSS injection into page headers to ensure faster loading of essential CSS while minifying HTML before the footer. Pro access to the plugin also unlocks further speed-boosting tools like lazy loading and image optimization.
Fast Velocity Minify
Fast Velocity Minify makes code optimization effortless by providing front-end code minification. The plugin does this only on pages not yet cached, so any future caching will automatically apply all necessary changes. Minifying techniques include optimizing HTML, checking for static CSS and JavaScript, which is then optimized, and restructuring code to be more form-fitting.
Honorable Mentions
Despite the 10 plugins above being among the best, many others are available to experiment with. These include lazy loaders like a3 Lazy Load and LazyLoad by WP Rocket, performance monitors like Query Monitor, and more specific optimizers like HeartBeat Control and Perfmatters.
Each of these can help your site load faster and make it a more enjoyable online destination for visitors.
