Over the years, we’ve helped over 4000 businesses speed up their WordPress sites. Using that experience and our knowledge. We’ve crafted this article to help you choose and implement the best WordPress speed optimization plugins for your business.
The easiest way to ensure that your site runs at the optimal level is to use a few handy WordPress speed optimization plugins that can significantly improve your site’s performance. Keep in mind that you can only install one or two plugins before things start working against you. it’s best to pick one or two and test them thoroughly.
That’s exactly why we created this post. To help you select a plugin that not only improves your site speed, but user experience as well. The list will also help you minimize the number of work necessary to get the job done while maximizing the results you’ll see. So let’s begin!
Best Caching Plugins
Caching is the process of storing data in a temporary storage location, otherwise known as a cache. This cuts down the time needed for the visitor’s request to be processed. And the information is served in a much faster manner.
Most web hosts and themes come with built-in caching features, such as Memcached or Redis. But if that’s not the case with your provider. There are plenty of plugins that will perform the same task and speed up your site’s loading time. By showing a certain amount of content to the user before the rest of the page is loaded.Â
The plugins we’ve selected top 3 of the best that WordPress has to offer, so let’s briefly review each.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the most user-friendly caching plugin on our list. It’s highly effective as well, which is why we use it for our sites and always recommend it.
The whole process of getting WP Rocket to work doesn’t take much time. And all the parameters that can be set and cached are clearly displayed, Lastly, it can easily be modified depending on what your website needs. Ease of use makes WP Rocket stand out as the most accessible caching plugin. And the best choice for administrators with not much experience in running sites or using plugins.
On the other hand, if you’re running an eCommerce-focused site. Many more specific inputs are needed when it comes to determining which data should and should not be cached. As stated before, it’s possible to change certain settings in WP Rocket. But remember that these changes can only affect page and web caching options.
W3 Total Cache
Unlike WP Rocket, W3 is a fairly technical caching plugin, specialized in data caching for sites that generate lots of traffic daily. As well as for those that require the caching to be done on a page-by-page level.Â
Caching on a page-by-page basis adjusts the data which will be cached on any page of your website. This method is essential for product-based eCommerce sites. Since a mistake in the caching of the product or the customer data can cause irreversible damage, such as data being manipulated, or accidentally leaked.
Anyway, it’s important to note that with the highly specific nature of this plugin’s features. The administrator will need some prior experience to use W3 constructively. A person without previous knowledge about sites and plugins is still going to be able to use it. But it might take some time before they catch on to it.
Redis Object Cache
If you’re looking for a caching plugin for a site with numerous daily visits, and you have a knowledgeable administrator, Redis is the perfect choice. Remember that in case you’re not very experienced with caching plugins, WP Rocket is still the best solution.
As you can tell by its name, Redis is an optimization plugin specialized in object caching. It comes with numerous features such as replication, clustering, sharing, cache prefetching, and analytics options. Redis is a WordPress API compliant plugin that supports the latest version of PHP.
Similar to W3, using Redis will require a bit more experience and knowledge about caching and which methods should be used to ensure the best performance.
Uptime monitoring
Once you’ve sorted your caching, you should move to Uptime monitoring.
Ensuring that your site is online at all times is important if you want to avoid your clients moving on to some of your competitors, especially if you’re running an eCommerce site.
Sites go offline for many reasons, such as server problems, network routers, broken plugins, etc., so monitoring your website performance and uptime is essential. Also, there are some other factors to worry about, such as occasional speed drops or unreliable connections. And given that this can happen at infrequent intervals, which makes it virtually impossible for a human to track. You will need a plugin to perform this task.
Our tool of choice for this purpose is UptimeRobot. This plugin will be very useful in keeping up with everything that’s happening on your site. In terms of generated speeds, frequent site lags, the average amount of downtime that you can expect on your site, etc.
Alongside website monitoring, UptimeRobot brings several other great additional monitoring options. SSL monitoring will track the expiry day of your certificate. Heartbeat monitoring will be in charge of sending the requests and checking if they arrive on time. Ping and port monitoring will take care of specific port or ping services.
High Quality, high-Performance Hosting
Good hosting is one of the cornerstones of your website’s performance and is crucial for speed. Keep in mind that a low-quality provider could never be compensated with any number of plugins, no matter how great they are.
If you aren’t provided with enough bandwidth, if you are allowed daily visitor number is too low, or if you’re experiencing constant drops in site speed, then it might be time to consider switching services. Or in case your business has grown, or its requirements have changed, or even if you feel like change is a good idea, then, again, we suggest you consider moving to a better host. Below, you’ll find some information about the hosting providers we usually recommend.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is our top choice when speaking of hosting providers, which typically ranks as the fastest host in the world. It comes with a bunch of benefits and features built in to help improve your site, like a CDN service, fire walling, and website acceleration service, to name a few.
Later on, we recommend you consider using Cloudflare’s APO service. Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) is a type of edge caching that you can get for as little as $5. This means that your entire pages will be stored on Cloudflare’s servers, which is why they’ll be sent faster to visitors. This drastically improves the site’s overall performance. We’ll talk more about Cloudflare and why we recommend it to all our clients in the CDN part of this article.
Lastly, if you’re considering Google AMP: Don’t’
Now that you know the best speed optimization plugins that can boost both your site performance and user experience, we would like to underline an optimization plugin we don’t find very helpful: Google AMP.
AMP uses Google Edge Caching on its network to quickly serve stripped-down versions of your web pages to the visitors. Simply put, this implies that you’re allowing Google to take control of your site.
Google is pushing themselves onto website owners and trying to capture more and more web traffic — you don’t need them to craft an amazingly fast experience. You can do it yourself.
Conclusion
This concludes our post on the best speed optimization plugins for WordPress sites. We hope you enjoyed the read! We suggest you try some plugins, except AMP, of course, for they should make a world of difference to your website speed and performance.
If you require any help, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
