Website speed is a really important factor that can impact the number of visitors to your website. It has been proven many times that if your loading speed is too slow, people will leave your site even before the page has finished loading.

Here are 3 powerful tools that can help your speed up your WordPress site for free.

1. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer

The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.

If there is one thing that needs to be optimized on your website, it is your images. Images, videos, and other media are the content that will need more server resources to load. If they aren’t optimized correctly, your site can take forever to load. The first thing is to upload web optimized image with a decent size. Not too heavy and not too small. But to reduce the size of your images, even more, you can use Ewww Image Optimizer. This plugin works great out-of-the-box and you can just install it and forget about it. Every time you upload an image to your WordPress installation, it will automatically generate an optimized version. You can also “Bulk Optimize” all images that you have already uploaded before installing this plugin.

2. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, and reducing download times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration.

W3 Total Cache is one of the most used WordPress cache plugins out there. It will automatically generate a set of cached pages of your website so your visitor will just see what it’s needed without your server having to make all the requests every time. This plugin is very complete and can be a little bit tricky to set up properly. Here is a tutorial on WPBegginer that should help you to understand all the options.

Edit: WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog.  After an HTML file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

I recently switched to WP Super Cache on most of my WordPress Themes Demos. I find it easier to maintain and set up, and at the end of the day, with fewer options, the performances are better.

3. Autoptimize

Autoptimize speeds up your website and helps you save bandwidth by aggregating and minimizing JS, CSS, and HTML.

Autoptimize is the typical “install it and forget it” kind of plugin. No need to dig into the options too much. Once installed, it will compress and minify JS, CSS, and HTML automatically. Be careful, though, if you have inline CSS on your page like in most WordPress themes with appearance options, it is recommended to disable the “Also aggregate inline CSS” option in the CSS section.

Conclusion

No need to install a ton of plugins to make your website load faster. Sometimes it can even make things worse. With these 3 plugins, you have all that you need to make your website loading speed as fast as possible. Once you will install these 3 bad boys, you can see the difference by testing your page speed on Pingdom.


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