11 Best Plugins for WordPress Performance

If your website lacks optimization, your audience might get frustrated with page load times. Users and customers have little patience for loading issues or errors.

Google Analytics reports that the most popular queries for website optimization are related to speed and image compression. Entire companies, Quora threads, and blogs are dedicated to questions like: “Why is my website loading slowly?”; and, “How can I boost loading time?”

On WordPress, many of these questions can be mitigated or resolved by installing or updating your WordPress plugins. This means you need to consider what type of plugins to use, and which ones will enhance your speed or performance.

If you’re a beginner, you might not know about WordPress plugins. These handy tools can enhance your website by customizing it, adding special features, and maximizing performance.

What do plugins do? WordPress performance plugins help with:

• Easy set-up and dashboard for non-technical savvy people
• Reducing HTTP requests and static CSS
• Turning off the unnecessary running add-ins
• Decreasing back-end load
• User friendly and compatible

1. WP Rocket

Don’t want to stress about web optimization? Since 2013, WP Rocket has been helping WordPress developers and users improve their performance. If you’re looking for all-in-one optimization, WP Rocket gives you full web optimization and improves your WordPress performance. Here are some of the features:

• Easy-to-use instructions: WP Rocket is built with simplicity in mind. They care for their customers and know that web development can be a complicated task.
• Cache: WP Rocket loads cache, reduces hit time, and loads the page faster.
• CSS, Javascript, and HTML: WP Rocket compresses static CSS, Javascript, and HTML files to be readily available for web page development.
• CloudFlare CDN: WP Rocket processes the CloudFlare CDN to get the cached content that improves the loading speed and reduces CPU usage on your web server.

2. Perfmatters

A website with poor performance will turn away your potential audience. Sometimes even web plugins can slow down your site, due to cache issues. By incorporating Perfmatters into your WordPress site, you can manage these as well.

Perfmatters “Quick-toggle options” can quickly help to:

• Disable unnecessary scripts and assets you might not be using on your site, such as emojis, embeds, dashicons, etc.
• Remove query strings from static resources to improve caching and fix warnings on speed tests.
• Disable comments and URLs to reduce spam or stop people from trying to backlink.
• And much more!

3. WP Smush

WP Smush is an award-winning plugin geared toward image optimization and speed enhancement. Their proprietary technology can be custom configured to your specific site, meaning your website will stay fast!

WP Smush optimizes your WordPress site by:

• Compressing your website’s images, without affecting quality.
• Making your image load in switch and flip of the load button.
• Integrating with other installed plugins on your WordPress site

4. W3 Total Cache

Every WordPress site possesses a cache — a system which brings visitors directly to the site but skips some steps in the loading process, saving time. However, you can boost the effectiveness of your WordPress site with W3 Total Cache. If you already have multiple plugins installed on your site, this is one of the best caching plugins!

W3 Total Cache optimizes your WordPress site by:

• Improving your site’s page ranking and aiding in your SEO performance
• Boosting compatibility with mobile search engines
• Increasing loading time by as much as 10x the original value
• Reducing static CSS, HTML files, and JavaScript

5. WP Fastest Cache

The plugin generates static sites that also boost page load times and improve search rankings. WP Fastest Cache offers to make your WordPress site run like a cheetah with the following feature

• Uses MOD WRITE which is the fastest plugin method
• Translates the computer language to human language and makes its features easy to use by admins
• Provides SSL, CDN, and CloudFlare support
• Not only packs in basic requirements for web optimization but also offers extra mobile and widget cache features, minify those zip files, CSS, and HTML plus files along with JS plus, database cleanup, image optimization, Google Font Async, and conversion of WebP

6. Fast Velocity Minify

Fast Velocity Minify is complicated for beginners, including features that require technical knowledge. It is designed with developers and advanced-level admins in mind.

Fast Velocity Minify is the upgraded version of WordPress plugins, which has WP Rocket’s features and WP Fastest Cache’s designations.

The features of this Advanced Pro level plugin are:

• Minification of CSS and JS files with PHP
• Reduction of HTTP requests by merging CSS & Javascript files into groups of files
• Front-end request management
• Google optimization, font inlining, merging and change
• Page Speed Insights and enhancement
• CDN support
• WP-CLI Commands

7. All-in-One WP Migration

All-in-One WP Migration can help you migrate your site to a new home or operating systems in a few clicks. It has awesome specs that offer to boost traffic up to 80%in a month.

Some benefits include:

• Not bound to specific hosts or operating systems
• Export a site to any system.
• Checks and optimizes web content and images.
• Selects which files you want to export and which images should appear.
• No required PHP extensions
• Supports MYSQL and MYS
• Provides quality assurance and a testing system
• Import whatever you want and any kind of file
• Extends WP-CLI integration
• Supports Hosting, Cloud Storage and Multisite extensions

8. Really Simple SSL Plugin

Not certain where a potential threat may be? Start with your SSL. The Really Simple SSL plugin provides a suite of SSL-related solutions that can improve your WordPress site right away.

Some benefits include:

• Extra HTTPS security
• Replacement for your knockdown SSL
• Advanced security headers
• Mixed content scanning

9. Yoast SEO

Yoast is a complete SEO service provider with an additional web-optimizing tool. SEO is one of the most important factors to consider when trying to get your content to rank in Google or other search engines. Yoast takes out considerable guesswork when optimizing your website for SEO.

Some features include:

• Indexing your website on major search engines.
• Disseminating content to search engines
• Creating titles that attract users
• Providing meta-description templates

10. Rank Math

Created by WP Developers, WP Super Cache offers robust solutions to complex caching issues, like clearing and treating users’ web caches, preventing slow-downs.

Want to bring consistent traffic to your website? Try Rank Math. It’s one of the leading free expert plugins for WordPress SEO.

Some features include:

• Sending breadcrumbs to search engines
• Optimizing your content’s metadata
• Simplifying social sharing

11. WP Super Cache

Created by WP Developers, WP Super Cache offers robust solutions to complex caching issues like specific user’s web browsing cache which happens when the outdated page’s web files are saved for faster future loading.

Some features include:

• Zip up your gzip-compressed files
• Modify page caches, pre-loading cache and advanced cache pre-load
• CloudFlare and CDN support

As a WordPress developer, the number of plugins to choose from can be overwhelming. It can be stressful researching the right one for your site. We hope this list is a good starting point for your development efforts, and if you need a hand, drop us a line! We’d be happy to find you the right people to get started knocking down those hurdles on your projects.