Best WordPress Tools & Plugins to Increase Your Site Speed in 2022
Are you trying to find a WordPress caching or minifying plugin? Or are you merely trying to speed up your WordPress setup? You'll learn about the top WordPress performance plugins in this article. You can modify your website in a number of ways with the help of plugins like caching, minification, lazy loading, and others.
Is your website slow? Is the bounce rate so high that you are about to quit? One of the drawbacks of a slow website is you don’t get any traffic, let alone conversions.
Statistics tell us if your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load, 90% of your traffic will bounce back. And once Google observes this pattern, it will de-rank your website – though such websites are only ranked if there’s no competition.
Fortunately, WordPress users can speed up their website by installing some free and premium plugins. You don’t need to be a coder or tech geek to use those plugins.
As a WordPress development services company, we use many of them. So we have compiled the list of the six best tools being used for this purpose – read on to find your best options!
6 Best WordPress Tools & Plugins to Increase Your Site Speed in 2022
Jetpack
Each plugin I’m going to mention here speeds up your website in some way, so you might need multiple plugins. If we talk about Jetpack, it has the ability to track the number of people visiting your website and the pages they visit. This way you can check the most visited pages.
Furthermore, it allows you to upload and display high-resolution images and videos without slowing down the website so you can offer an exemplary user experience on your website. You can also view the site stats and downtime.
This plugin is a must for e-commerce store owners where conversions are driven by the quality of user experience and making shopping convenient.
Some other notable features of this plugin are:
- Login protection
- Social sharing
- Access to free themes
- Customization of designs
- Email subscriptions.
Perfmatters
Perfamatters improves the page load time by allowing you to disable the elements and features slowing down the website. You can turn them on and off using this plugin.
Besides that, you can disable the scripts on a per-page basis. The HTTP requests that aren’t needed are a big cause of slowing loading speed. You can even stop plugins when they aren’t needed, which further improves your website’s performance.
Some other performance-boosting features are DNS, prefetch, preconnect, and local Google Analytics script hosting. Already have a WordPress caching plugin? Don’t worry, you can still use this plugin.
Minify Plugins
Minify plugins are another great option to utilize and make your website faster. It’s quite common among WordPress as it is free. These tools speed up the loading speed by compressing the HTML source, inline JavaScript, and CSS to reduce file sizes.
Minify plugins remove all unnecessary characters from your website’s source code – which, if done manually, will take a lot of time and effort. The minifying and merging of CSS and JS files increase the site’s speed to a great extent.
One of the notable parts of this toolset is Autoptimize, it’s an all-in-one Minify plugin that aggregates, minifies, and caches scripts by injecting CSS into page headers. You can also optimize the images using this tool.
WP Rocket.
WP Rocket, don’t tell me you haven’t heard about this plugin before. If you have been using WordPress for a while, chances are you already know about it. It offers all the caching functionality you need to boost your website’s speed along with a bunch of other useful features.
From easy-to-use interface and instant installation to lazy loading, database optimization, and even the ability to host Google Analytics code on your own site, you will not regret paying for it ( yeah, it’s a paid tool).
Also, you can delay the JavaScript execution time using it – which will have a huge impact on page load times and Core Web Vitals.
Here are a few other features apart from speed optimization:
- CDN integration
- Direct Cloudflare integration
- Settings import and export
- Version rollback
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Do you have hundreds of images on your website? If yes, you need a tool that can optimize all of them at once – or a tool like Shortpixel that’s specifically designed for such WordPress websites.
This tool serves all your compressed and resized images from a CDN. It can reduce the file size by up to 90% without affecting the quality of the image. It gives you three different levels – lossy, and glossy. and lossless – so you can compromise according to your needs.
Content Delivery Networks
Do you know what a CDN is? Also known as Content Delivery Network, it’s a collection of geographically distributed and interconnected third-party services used to house cached copies of data. That data could be videos, images, web pages, or anything.
Even the location of your host server can impact your WP site’s speed. CDNs store and deliver copies of static web content from the nearest server so the load time of the page can be minimized.
Less data travel time means faster delivery of data, and thus you enjoy high page load speed.
Final Words
There are hundreds of plugins used for this purpose. Choosing one of them can be really tricky and confusing. We have mentioned the best six options so you don’t have to try and test dozens of them before finding the best one.
But make sure they are compatible with other plugins installed on your website to avoid any conflict and negative effects on performance.
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