Speed is everything nowadays. If your website is not fast enough and your pages take a long time to load, visitors tend to leave since by nature people are impatient. Small delays in opening images or video can make people abandon your website which is of course not your purpose. In other words, a slow website will not make you popular and will not attract many visitors.
Since people don’t want to wait and even Google looks at the speed of your site to give it it’s page ranking, you have to know how your website scores. Luckily there is a great free tool which you can use to know the loading time of your website. On Pingdom you can test your WordPress driven site by entering the URL of your site which will then test and give you your current loading time.
Although experts say a plugin overkill on your website can slow down your loading time, there are also some great plugins which will do the opposite, they will make your website faster. Let’s take a look at 5 very useful free WordPress plugins to help you speed up things a bit.
WP Super Cache
The WP Super Cache is the most popular plugin available in the WordPress.org catalog and it has been downloaded over 6.6 million times. The plugin was developed with the help of the WordPress.org creators Automaticc which will give you some information about how well this plugin works.
The plugin is easy to setup and works out-of-the-box if you wish. There are also some additional settings if you need more features and tweaks. The WP Super Cache promises the user to deliver static files of your pages/posts to over 99% of your visitors by using mod_rewrite, PHP or legacy caching.
What this plugin basically does is creating static html files from your dynamic WordPress website. After this html file is generated, the webserver will serve that file instead of processing the heavier PHP scripts. This way visitors who are not logged in, who did not left a comment of who did not read a password protected post/page will see your pages way quicker
For more tweaking and setting possibilities, check the WP Super Cache page and information.
W3 Total Cache
Another great Cache plugin is the much acclaimed W3 Total Cache plugin. This plugin was developed by Frederick Townes and has been downloaded from the WordPress.org catalog over 4.2 million times. The plugin is highly recommended by web hosts companies like Page.ly, Dreamhost, MediaTemple, GoDaddy and HostGator.
According to the information, W3 Total Cache is the only WordPress Performance Optimization framework designed to improve user experience and overall page speed. The plugin will improve the speed of your website by generating static html files of your blog posts or pages which will be showed to your visitors.
BJ Lazy Load
Another plugin which will speed up your WordPress website is BJ Lazy Load. This plugin will lazy load all images which can be found on your website making sure they only get downloaded if visible to the readers/viewers.
By default WordPress downloads all images upon page load which can slow down your website if there are many images involved or images of high resolution. When your website will use lazy loading it prioritizes all the content above the so called “first fold”. In other words, the content the visitor will see first gets loaded first. Instead of loading the whole content, this plugin makes use of placeholders so images are only loaded when they become visible to the viewer.
WP Smush.it
Another image related plugin is WP Smush.it. This plugin will optimize your images by stripping away all metadata and removing unused colors from indexed images. The result will be images with smaller file sizes so they will load quicker, all this without noticeable loss of image quality.
The mistake a lot of beginners with WordPress make is uploading their images without retouching and modifying them first. This results in upload of high resolution images which will slow down your website performances. Instead of uploading the original images, you could reduce their file sizes and crop sizes with a free online tool like Pixlr Express. If you upload your images already in the correct size will also be much more efficient.
WordPress comes with a build in image editor allowing you to crop images to a desired size but the original file size can still cause problems and will remain on your server. WP Smuch.it compresses your image which is a great solution, even if you already use cropped and modified images.
Plugin Organizer
Although too many plugins are not always good for your website speed, sometimes you just need or want certain plugins to be active. Some of these plugins you will only use on a particular page or post but will get loaded on every single page/post which in essence is not necessary. A slow load time of your website is sometimes attributed to your plugins so organizing them makes sense.
By default WordPress will load the plugins on every single file related with your website, whether you use it on this page or not. Plugin Organizer can override the urge of WordPress by loading each plugin on every page/post. You can decide on which pages or posts you want certain plugins to be loaded. You can do this by a simple checkbox system which is easy enough to use.
With this plugin you can also prioritize the plugin load order by adding a drag and drop function to the plugin section of your dashboard. Plugins which are important can be moved up and plugins which are less important can be moved down. You can even make groups and organize related plugins to simplify the task of organizing your plugins.
WP-Optimize
Everything of your WordPress website is stored in your database where you can find all your posts, pages and settings. By default WordPress generates so called revisions of your content which makes generating posts and pages easier. Every autosaved revision takes up space in your database which evently can slow down your website.
Since you don’t want to dive into your MYSQL Database everytime to delete these revisions and other junk files, you can use the WP-Optimize plugin instead. This plugin will help you declutter and clean up your database tables in a number of ways. You can enable/disable trackbacks for all published posts, enable/disable comments, remove revisions and trashed comments, clean up other metadata and pingbacks etc.
WP Optimize is a simple but very effective and useful plugin to extensively clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without doing manual queries in your PhpMyAdmin.
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