6 Word press plug-ins that would help boost your site speed
Site load speed is something that you should keep in mind if you have a website of your own. After all the hard work that you put into building your website, you don’t want it to get affected or fall behind due to lack of speed. Yes folks – you heard us right! Site speed matters – a lot! If you want to see your website succeed, then increasing or improving site speed is an essential part of the whole process to website design and web development. Would you actually have the patience to remain stuck on one slow loading website, or would you choose to rather move on to another website, thus shying away from the slow loading website. Probably not long – right?
Most visitors will wait for just a few seconds for the particular site to load before they move on to the next site. A site with better loading speed will rank better – plain and simple. A slow loading website could prove to be trouble if you do not do anything about it. You have to work around it to make your website load faster. There is certain word press plug-ins that is designed to accelerate site load speed through certain mechanisms. It mostly depends on the structure, reach and the design specifications of your page.
There are various plug-ins for different categories. For high traffic websites, we have certain kind of plug-in. We also have plug-in for image heavy sites and much more. Here is some of the plug-ins that is some of the favorites:-
1.Faster Rendering: WP Fastest Cache
If you are looking for a plug-in that is fast as lightning, intuitive, and maintains a 5 star rating even after a total of 3 million downloads then WP Fastest Cache should be your choice. You have done all the hard work and now your website is generating thousands of impressions. That’s awesome. That’s what you wanted after all right? But you must also remember the fact that, more of the traffic flow is generated for your site, further more RAM and CPU is being used which leads to slow rendering which is not a good thing.
A static HTML file is created. This enables multiple users to end up on the same static page rather than rendering the page again and again. There have been 400,000 active installations for this plug-in. The only slight disadvantage is that you may need a paid version to enjoy the full benefits of this plug-in. this plug-in has a 5 star rating. How bad could it be? After all 400,000 cannot be wrong.
2.Caching: W3 Total Cache
This is a free web caching option and known to be one of the most advanced web performance optimization plug-in till date. This plug-in is known to be one of the most well recommended and well known WPO frameworks built by web developers and web host, which is being used by big businesses such as AT&T and Mashable. You must ask yourself, what are the things that this plug-in can do for you? Or, moreover, is it the right option for you? This word press plug-in boasts of providing the following:-
– 10 times of improvement in overall site performance
– Conversion rate improvement
– Improvement in search engine rankings
– Up to 80 % bandwidth savings
And that’s just the beginning. This is a big time plug-in. It has tons of features including high volume; high traffic sites, and is also a plug-in with similar capabilities. But there is a disadvantage to this plug-in. the features are complex for most users.
3.Compressing Java script and CSS with WP Super Minify word press plug-in
There have been a total of 20,000 active installations and the numbers keep piling up. It helps compress and combine JavaScript and CSS files that help in time reduction for page load speed. Begin by downloading the plug-in. then upload it to the directory and finally try and activate it through plug-ins menu. It’s a completely foolproof and simple process. This plug-in helps increase Google page speed load and is effective to some extent in comparison to many other word press plug-ins out there. With this plug-in there might be a meager 2% to 4% increase in page load speed.
4.WP Smush that helps reduce image size
Larger images would actually reduce page load speed of your website. Thus this is where ‘WP Smush’ word press plug-in makes a grand entry. This is an award winning image compression plug-in, where you can compress images and decrease the overall size of the image, keeping the integrity and image quality the same. Here is what you will get with WP Smush:-
– It is known to support all image formats including PNG, JPEG and GIF.
– You can remove all colors from images that are unused
– Can work in tandem with other plug-ins
– You can compress any image in your directory
– Now you easily remove any metadata from your jpeg images
– This plug-in can compress at least 50 images at a time. That’s cool!
– This is the go to plug-in for image optimization.
5.BJ Lazy Load that helps decrease page load by a huge margin
If your page is large, and has many images, you can still work with it and reduce the size of your page so that load time is decreased significantly. BJ Lazy is the ultimate solution. Once you install the plug-in, it no longer loads all at once. It’s not a bad thing at all. While you scroll down, the content iframes will be replaced with placeholders. This will help load bit by bit instead of all of at once.
6.WP Optimize – Optimizing the database
Running a blog or website can be tough and create an inefficient database. Once a page is saved, the word press creates a revision of that page. So if you have edited it 6 times, then there might be remaining 5 copies to this post. This may lead to slower access as more data gets added to the database. Large blogs might on the other hand have spam or un-approved comments that may cause inefficiency. This is where WP Optimize comes in. it helps you clean up the database and optimize it for better performance to make it run better.
This way your database will run neatly, fast, and efficiently. Once you enable the plug-in, it will automatically clean up the database through removal of data not required including unnecessary comments, bad or thin content, MYSQL tables, and show potential savings. Downloading this plug-ins is easy as you can easily download and use one of these plug-ins in no time. Your site will reach its full potential, when it is fully optimized for usability and speed.