10 Best Plugins To Boost Your Website Speed

Are you a WordPress website owner and want to speed up your website for search engines?.. Of course, who does not want this? But before moving forward, let me assure you that you have reached the right place. In this article, I am listing 10 best plugins to boost your website speed and help you rank batter in the google search engine. 

Why Your Website Should Load Fast?

We all know designing a website takes a lot of efforts. We demonstrate our business product and services to visitors who later become our potential customers through a website. If any visitor lands on our website and experiences poor loading of content, he’ll probably leave the web page and go to our competitor’s website for his quest. 

It will leave a negative impact on your website indexing, and Google will never rank your website. This is why it is essential to boost your website speed for ultimate user experience and to rank higher on search engines. 

How To Boost Your Website Speed?

 

• The first step is to analyse your website speed. You can check the page speed using Google Page Speed, Load Impact, or Pingdom. 
• A recommended page load time is under 2 seconds. You may enable compression, minify CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and Leverage browser caching if it is not. 
• The size of your files impacts the loading speed. If your website has heavier files, it will take more time to load all the content. 
• It is suggested to keep your WordPress website simple and eliminate the files that are not required. 

To make your website load faster, you may use the top caching plugins I’ve mentioned in this article. All of these are highly recommended by the majority of WordPress users. 

10 Best Plugins To Boost Your Website Speed

 

Flying Press (Paid)

On our list, the top caching plugin is Flying Press, which preloads pages instantly even before even clicking on them. I personally recommend this plugin to everyone and using it for my own website. This plugin is designed to fix issues with the Quicklink and Instant page. These are the small javascript files to detect links in the port view. 

The plugin places a small JavaScript code Up to 1KB gzipped. Then it waits till the browser becomes inert and starts detecting pages in the viewport to preload them. An Intersection Observer helps the plugin complete this process and tells the browser to reload the pages by utilizing prefetch. 

Also, the flying press restricts the number of preloads per second. It saves your website from slowing down or crashing due to too many links on the pages. The plugin also detects the user’s network like 3G, 2G, or if the user has a slow network. In this case, the plugin will not preload anything.

Pros.

• Helps to detect the reason for slow load and crash servers.
• Understands the user’s network connection and preference.
• Preload pages in the viewport and mouse hover. 
• Avoid preloading in case the server is busy.

Cons.

• It increases server load, so make sure you have a good hosting plan.

 

Swift Performance (Paid)

The second rank is occupied by Swift Performance which is an advanced caching plugin for WordPress. It is a unique one in the market and the best at speeding up your website. The plugin creates static versions of your web pages to browse and load them faster. It not only minifies CSS and JavaScript files but also eliminates render-blocking assets. 

The in-built image optimizer compresses the JPEG and PNG images to enhance your website performance. It has a robust database optimizer that allows you to switch among several plugins if your hosting module is not working correctly. Also, you can quickly import or export your settings to other sites. 

It also has a small embedded feature that avoids unnecessary asset load until the visitor clicks on the play button. Overall, it is lightweight, and you get excellent customer support in case you need help setting up or having slow responses after installation.

Pros.

• Affordable with many powerful speed-up features.
• Option to set up any CND with advanced Cloudflare support.
• Easy to set up with the help of step by step process and auto-configuration.
• Unlimited image optimizer and database organizer.

Cons.

• Lazy load-scripts respond slowly sometimes. 

WP Smush

(Both Free and Paid Plans)

WP Smush is a very useful plugin to boost your website speed. This plugin ranks first in our list because it is widely used and has more than 1 million active installations. It improves your website page speed by optimizing, resizing, and compressing the images. 

If the images on a website’s page are not correctly optimized for the web, it may slow down the loading. This will leave a negative impact on your ranking. The WP Smush turns on lazy load and optimizes images without losing their quality. 

It detects incorrect size images that slow down your images and quickly locate them to fix issues. Moreover, this plugin is compatible with every type of plugin you use to manage your WordPress image library efficiently. However, the WP Smush is free with some significant features, but you may update to a paid version for some advanced features.

Pros

• It optimizes all types of image files, including PNG, JPEG, and GIF files.
• Compress images and strip unused data without losing the image quality.
• Wrong size image finder for highlighting incorrect images.

Cons

• However, it is easy to use but compresses only a few percent of the image size.

WP Rocket (paid)

The WP Rocket is a high-quality plugin to optimize your website speed and performance. It is one of the most potent caching plugging that WordPress experts suggest using. The various optimization options and automatic update features enhance website performance by up to 80%. 

Moreover, this plugin’s multilingual compatibility helps you customize the cache for all languages and your selected language at the same time. If you run an eCommerce website, you need not be worried as WP Rocket eliminates sensitive pages from the cache and makes the purchasing process smooth. 

The best thing I liked about this plugin is that it works with all sizes and websites. Even if you are from a non-technical background or a beginner, you can make the most out of it because of its user-friendly interface. However, the plugin is paid, but you can start with a 14 days free trial. 

Pros.

• Preloads the cache automatically every time you make changes to your website.
• Compatible with a lot of popular plugins and themes.
• It diminishes the page size and makes your files lighter.
• Easy to manage and optimize the database.

Cons.

• None.

Perfmatters (Paid)

Perfmatters is a web page speed optimization plugin that enables your website to load faster than ever. There are a lot of website owners and WordPress bloggers using Perfmatters. It helps boost your website speed by disabling scripts, code snippets, or any other factor that is not used on the website. The plugin provides you with great security features.

Also, it removes query strings that may hamper CDN content like images, CSS, and JavaScript. If you manage many WordPress sites or WordPress Multisite, this allows you to apply settings to your subsites from your default website. Also, if you have an e-commerce website or are using woo commerce, it works well. 

You can add a definite script for your product or cart and checkout pages of your e-commerce website. It loads the script only when required; otherwise, it disables them. If you are a beginner with 1 website, you may start with a basic plan that costs around $25.

Pros.

• Effective script manager to disable script across your website.
• Easy to optimize and maintain your website’s database regularly.
• Supports all caching plugins, including WP Rocket or LiteSpeed.
• Testing mode to see the changes in website preview.

Cons.

• None.

WP Super Cache (Free)

The next one on our list is WP Super Cache that generates static HTML files from your WordPress website or blog. Now, instead of featuring heavy PHP scripts, it serves and processes the generated HTML files. 

It automatically releases a lot of load on your website by doing this process. You can quickly produce cached files for posts, tags, and categories of your website. It serves the static HTML files to all users, including a user not logged in and a user who did not comment on your post. It can serve a cached file multiple times, and more than 95% of the visitors will have static HTML files. 

The plugin uses three different ways to cache the files, expert, simple, and WP-cache caching. However, the most recommended way to use this plugin is Simple, which is easier to configure and serves static files by PHP. If you are not good at PHP, then the Simple mode is easy to edit and set up. 

Pros. 

• Works well on multiple websites and with other popular optimization plugins.
• Option to translate the plugging into various languages.
• Utilizes Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up your website.
• Garbage collection and cache timeout option to manage space.

Cons.

• It is confusing and challenging to set up for beginners.
• Great for a simple WP environment, but may occur severe bugs while put in use for multisite.
  

W3 Total Cache (Both Free and Paid Plans)

Another best plugin to boost your website speed is W3 Total Cache. More than a million active users are benefiting from their website without even paying a penny. It enhances user experience by reducing the load time of your website. This plugin optimizes your WordPress up to 10 times better for fast loading. 

The CDN integration and WPO framework improvise in SEO page rankings. It improves page rankings for those websites using SSL certificates or the website designed to be mobile-friendly. Moreover, the pudding is compatible with all kinds of hosting servers like shared, dedicated, or VPS, so you quickly set this up with your hosting. 

W3 Total Cache compresses the HTML, CSS, and javascript files to reduce the page sizes and load time. It enables data storing from recent requests to reuse and process that data on some specific requests. Overall, I will suggest you start with the free version if you are a beginner. You can also get a paid version of W3 Total Cache for full configuration and features.

Pros.

• Easy to set up with all kinds of hosting servers.
• Advance metrics to know your website performance and caching statistics.
• Easy to control caching times for comments.
• Anyone in the world can access your website at lightning speed.

Cons.

• It is a bit complex and takes time to get set with everything.

NitroPack (Both Free And Paid)

The NitroPack boosts your website speed effortlessly by using an enhanced optimization approach. It is not a WordPress plugin but a cloud-based web speed optimization platform. The advanced caching mechanism of NitroPack takes care of code minification, lazy loading, and image optimization. Instead of removing, you can invalidate cache files to keep serving your users from the cache. 

It is best when you have started a campaign and are getting tons of traffic on your website. It works fine with all kinds of content management systems like open source, proprietary, or cloud-based CMS. Also, it creates critical CSS for each layout, even if you have multiple pages with the same type of posts in different layouts. 

Overall, it is an all-in-one platform that removes the requirement of various caching, code optimization, and image optimization plugins. The Nitropack is free with basic features. If you want to avail full features, like more page views and CDN Bandwidth, NitroPack also has paid plans for that.

Pros.

• All in one platform save your money on different plugins.
• Works excellent with eCommerce website plugins like woo commerce, Magento and opencart.
• Improves google page speed score for better ranking.
• No need to be tuned technically to use this plugin.

Cons.

• Sometimes it makes the website look unattractive and adds so many codes in the header.

WP Super Minify(Free)

The WP Super Minify plugin minifies and compresses JS, HTML, and CSS files to reduce website loading time. Most of the WordPress website owners already use and know about this plugin to increase their webpage speed. It removes unwanted codes, spaces, and line breaks in your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files. 

By doing this, it minimizes the number of external requests to enhance your web page speed. This is highly recommended because you don’t need any additional minifying plugins if you have WP Super Minify. It utilizes the latest modified time in filename generation to keep freshness and loads of all external Javascript files. 

The best thing, it is free, and even a beginner can use this plugin effectively with a user-friendly interface. Overall, you don’t need any specific requirements to use this plugin. It is highly recommended for beginners as well as for intermediate WordPress website owners. 

Pros.

• Easy to configure and use.
• On-demand minifying cache inline Javascript and CSS files.
• It makes the heavy files smaller and helpful for improving the ranking on google.

Cons.

• It does not work with DIVI themes, as it may spoil the website template terribly.
• Indeed, it makes the difference but not much.

Cache Enabler (Free)

Cache Enabler is a powerful WordPress caching plugin that is easy to operate and requires minimal configuration. It is good at improving website speed without making a lot of effort. The Cache Enabler generates static HTML files and saves them on the server. This reduces the loading time by delivering saved static HTML files without intensive and heavy backend processing in the database. 

It shrinks images without a need for JavaScript and supports all image formats. Moreover, the plugin is designed with precision and takes less time to set up. You can also view the actual cache size on the dashboard and check how much space the cache occupies. The quick and efficient caching approach features both automated and manual options to clean the cache.

This is highly recommended for those website owners having a more significant part of their website dependent on images. For an eCommerce website or blogs, you need to upload product images regularly. 

Pros.

• Easy to set up and use. 
• Fast and efficient cache engine with automatic smart cache clearing
• Displays cache size in the WordPress dashboard
• It also supports WordPress multisite network. 

Cons.

• It does not work with a few WordPress plugins and themes.

We discussed some of the best plugins that are helping many WordPress websites and blog users. Also, we recognized that speeding up a website is an essential factor to grow your business. It is important to keep your website simple and remove the heavy load and cache. All plugins mentioned in this post wor excellent to optimize your website speed. 

You can begin with the free version of  WP Smush, NitroPack or W3 Total Cache then upgrade with a paid plan. However, if you are already using a free plugin to boost your website speed which doesn’t make much impact, you may try the paid plan of Flying Press, Swift Performance, or WP Rocket.