If your website takes longer than it took you to read this sentence to load, then you are in BIG trouble. Luckily, if you have a WordPress website, there are a number of WordPress Plugins that’ll make your website load so quickly your visitors won’t even notice they’re already using it. It’s a known fact that 53% of mobile users bounce if the website takes more than 3 seconds to load. 87% of carts are abandoned if the load time is more than 2 seconds and 79% of users who have a negative experience with a website are less likely to buy again! Before we get started with how to rectify website speed, let us take a look at a few options to test whether your website loads fast enough. Some popular options include: Load Impact, Google Page Speed, GTmetrix, Web Page Test, Pingdom Website Speed Test, IsItWP.
How can you use WordPress Plugins to optimize the load times?
WordPress optimization plugins tend to focus on several key features such as Cache, WordPress HeartBeat API, Reducing or disabling Ajax, Deferring Scripts, CDNs, Lazy Loading, Minification and Concatenation.
So, what are the various WordPress Plugins that can make your website load faster?
WP Super Cache: Faster Rendering: With 2+ million active installations, this free plugin is made by Automatic and is very easy to use. It has advanced settings to let you choose Gzip compression, Browser caching and how content is caches as well as how often cache should be updated.
W3 Total Cache: Faster Rendering: With 1 million + active installations, this free plugin is also popular has offers at least 10x improvement in overall site performance, improvement in conversion rates and up to 80% bandwidth savings.
WP Super Minify: Compressing JavaScript & CSS Files: With 10000+ active users this free plugin works on minification. It has a simple three step installation process and many users get 3 – 4 % increase in Google Page Speed.
WP Smush: Reducing Image Size: With 1 million + active installations, this WordPress plugin is also free. It reduces the overall size of every image without compromising integrity or quality. All the major and common image formats are supported.
BJ Lazy Load: Decreasing Pageload: 80000+ active installations make this plugin the most popular one among the lazy load types.
WP-Optimize: Optimizing the Database: with 900000+ active installations, this plugin cleans up and optimizes databases so that they run better. It also enables automatic clean ups of spam comments and trash comment.
Autoptimize: Script Optimization: The plugin has 1 million + installations and is free to use. It works on minification, concatenations, differs some images and toggles some basic scripts on and off.
ShortPixel: Image Compression: This plugin has 200000 + active installations and can automatically resize the images to the max dimensions of your choice. It compresses them with lossy or lossless compression.
Lazy Load by WP Rocket: Lazy Loading: With 100000+ active installation, this plugin like other plugins only loads the part of the page you see. Lazy load from WP Rocket works with more than just images – it works with iFrames, YouTube videos, you also get the option of embedding a thumbnail of video that doesn’t plat until it’s activated.
Cache Enabler: Faster Rendering: This plugin has 90000_ active users and is free to use and easy to setup. It enables to clear the cache with a click of a button. It also has programmatic cache clearing and minification features.
Other than these, WordPress has a number of plugins for optimizing the speed of your website. Once you select the right plugin to suit your website, you will see a difference in your website performance and resulting a difference in SEO.
