WordPress performance plugins are crucial to the speed of your website. Choosing the right ones helps your site become faster and easier to use can make or break your site.
Speed matters more than ever. Search engines take site speed into account when they’re producing search results. Users expect your site to load in 3 seconds or less.
A slow website could cost you conversions, sales, and a prominent search ranking. If your website is slow, you need to take care of your site’s speed immediately.
Read on to find out what plugins you need to get your site running like a high-performance machine.
Check Your Speed Issues
You’ll want to know where your site is slowing down. That will enable you to know how to go about speeding up your site.
The three sites you want to visit are Google Page Speed Insights, GT Metrix and Pingdom. Each site will give you a score and will tell you what you need to address.
The results will be slightly different between tools. Address issues one at a time, and you’ll speed up your site in no time.
Ewww Image Compression
One of the most common issues in WordPress is that site owners don’t compress their image sizes before they’re uploaded.
Ewww Image Optimizer is a free plugin that will optimize your images for you. You can compress images that have already been uploaded and compress them as they’re uploaded.
WP Smush It
This is a popular image compression tool that’s free to use. You can compress images that have already been uploaded to your site. The free version limits you to 50 images at a time.
AMP
AMP is a Google project called Accelerated Mobile Pages. As of right now, a lot of news sites have incorporated AMP technology. Most sites haven’t used it and there’s been an ongoing debate as to whether it’s necessary or not.
Google has targeted this technology towards advertisers, publishers, and e-commerce sites. AMP can make sites load more quickly on mobile devices. You can install the Accelerated Mobile Pages plugin and see for yourself.
BJ Lazy Load
When you tested your site’s speed in Google, you may have noticed a message that referred to lazy loading images on your site.
If your site is image heavy and those images are further down the page, they’ll still have to load. With lazy loading, a placeholder is put in place until the user scrolls to that part of your site.
WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache stores a copy of your site on your host’s server. That saves someone going to your site from having to download and execute every file on your site.
This is an ideal caching plugin for beginner WordPress users. With this plugin, you just install it, do a few clicks, and your site is faster.
W3 Total Cache
Out of all of the WordPress performance plugins, this one has the best reputation to speed up your site. W3 Total Cache will create a cache of your site, which will make your site download faster.
Among the many features of W3 Total Cache is the ability to integrate with CDNs such as Cloudflare and Key CDN.
On the downside of using W3 Total Cache is that beginning users of WordPress won’t understand the many functions and settings available.
CDN Performance Plugins
In case you’re not familiar with CDNs, they’re called Content Delivery Networks. CDNs understand that people can come to your site from all over the world. They store copies of your website on servers all over.
If your customer is in New York but tries to access your site that’s hosted in California it can take precious time for the information to travel to the user.
A CDN would have a server closer to the user, say in New Jersey, which would lessen the amount of time for information to travel. Your CDN with WordPress to speed it up by using plugins like CDN Enabler and Key CDN.
Security Plugins Bonus
Your site’s speed is becoming more important to your business. A slow website can turn into a few conversions and less business. Another thing that can affect your company’s image and search rankings is an attack by hackers.
WordPress sites are increasingly vulnerable to attack and hackers like to target WordPress sites. A cyber attack could cause your web host to pull your website and search engines can penalize it. That would make your site disappear from search results.
You can protect your site with the help of a few tools. A website monitoring tool can tell you if your site is down for any reason, including a cyber attack.
A WordPress security plugin can also protect your site and your business’s reputation. These are two that are always among the top plugins.
WordFence
WordFence notifies you when you need to update your plugins and system. People who don’t regularly update their website are prone to phishing and other hacking attacks. WordFence lets you know if your site is vulnerable and how you can fix it.
You’ll also know if there are any attempts to inject code onto your site. This is how malware and spam get on your site, which could hurt your site’s visitors.
Sucuri Firewall
Sucuri notifies you if there is an attempted login on your site or if any changes are made to your site. You can upgrade to the full suite of services which include backup software and a WordPress performance plugin.
WordPress Performance Plugins Give Your Site a Major Boost
Your website’s speed has a major impact on your business. Speed affects how people perceive your brand and whether or not they do business with you. Site speed also has an impact on how your site appears in search engines.
The bottom line is that the importance of your site’s speed cannot be understated. With these WordPress performance plugins, you can speed up your site in a few clicks.
Want more WordPress tips? Find out about local SEO services and how they can help your business.
