Nowadays, building a WordPress website is simple. You have thousands upon thousands of guides and templates that could assist you create a website in just mere hours or even minutes.
Then, as new ideas appear and the website grows, now you have to ensure your website runs smoothly and loads swiftly as it has to catch up with new ideas and increase growth.
One of the easiest steps to do this is by utilizing thousands of available plugins WordPress community offers.
So, we’ll share seven top-performing plugins that can optimize your WordPress speed and save it from losing visitors in 2023 right now.
Caching Plugins
In simpler terms, a caching plugin can speed up your website by storing frequently used information, like images, in a special place so it can be quickly fetched and displayed to your site visitors.
This way, your website can load faster and provide a better user experience.
1. WP Super Cache – By Automattic
This plugin is definitely a top contender in the caching plugins category, with over 2 million active installations it offers a variety of features to help you solve your website caching issues and thus improving its performance.
With its simple setup and advanced configuration for those who need it, these are some main advantages you should utilize. And here are some other of their features:
- Multiple caching options (simple to expert)
- Support for CDN
- Cache Preload
Price: Free
2. WP Fastest Cache – By Emre Vona
Second only to the previous plugin, WP Fastest Cache is not just an alternative but also a full-featured performance WordPress optimization plugin with focus on caching.
So, other than your usual caching features, WP Fastest Cache also offers:
- Widget Caching
- Code Minify
- Lazy Load
Price: Free & Paid (for advanced features)
Image/Media Optimization Plugins
Many blogs to ecommerces using WordPress usually have a lot of images. It’s important to ensure that the images are optimized for better performance—and again—user experience.
Because nobody likes a slow website. And large image files can be one of the culprits. They take longer to load, slowing down your website’s loading speed by a noticeable amount.
With this type of plugin, you’ll have the option to resize, compress, and ultimately optimize your images without damaging their quality.
1. Smush – By WPMU Dev
Just like what the image says, Smush is the number one search result when you search for an “image optimization plugin” in WordPress. To see how Smush achieve that, you can see a few features from them here:
- Lossless compression
- Bulk/multiple images optimization
- Background & automated optimization
Price: Free & Paid (for advanced features)
2. a3 Lazy Load – By a3rev Software
While this plugin doesn’t do optimization by image compression, it optimizes how images and videos perform on the website by doing lazy load, where users only load images or videos when they actually see them.
This optimization plugin also offers various lazy load support for:
- Multiple types of images (widgets, thumbnails, horizontal scroll images)
- Embed or Widget Video
- IFrame
- WebP format Images
Price: Free & Paid Option
Code Optimization Plugins
Code optimization usually involves minifying and compressing the website’s files, which can reduce their size and make them load faster.
A WordPress code optimization plugin can automate this process, allowing you to easily optimize the code inside with just a few simple clicks.
1. Autoptimize – By Frank Goossens
In general Autoptimize does HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code optimization by doing two things:
- Code minification: removing unnecessary code while still maintaining the functionality
- Code aggregation: combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the load a web page
Then, if you know what you need and want more advanced features, Autoptimize also other extra paid features such as:
- CDN support and image optimization
- Delay HTML, CSS, or JS load
Price: Free & Paid
2. Asset CleanUp – By Gabe Livan
Asset CleanUp plugin offers a variety of options to assist your performance optimization process other than just code minification, because it has several other features such as:
- CSS or JavaScript Preload
- Delete possible conflicts between plugins or themes
- Fonts Optimization
- Remove unnecessary meta tags, links, and HTML comments
Price: Free & Paid Option
All-in-one Plugin
As you might have noticed from the list of plugins we mentioned earlier, some of them serve multiple purposes and can overlap between the three categories we’ve defined.
So, we believe that an all-in-one category is necessary. While there are many plugins that fit into this category, each having similar features to one and another, we now only have one plugin that hopefully covers many of your optimization needs at once.
LiteSpeed Cache – By LiteSpeed Technologies
LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP), as they call themselves, combines several optimization features found in separate plugins, including the ones we mentioned earlier. Here are just a few of the features you can expect from LSCWP:
- Image compression
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Lazy load images
- Browser & Mobile Caching
- Multiple CDN Support
Price: Free & Paid Option
Wrapping Up
With the right optimization plugins, you can significantly improve your WordPress website’s performance and stay ahead of the competition.
These plugins can help you increase site speed, improve SEO, and ultimately enhance user experience. But be careful, if you choose to use multiple optimization plugins make sure that every plugin is compatible with each other and not redundant.
So, what are you waiting for? Learn more about these plugins and start optimizing your website today. Remember, a fast and smooth website is key to success in the digital age!.
Or do you want to just upgrade your website? Let’s talk more about how our developers can help you build your website right here.
