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
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.
Hello…very useful list of plugins.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Great post! But you missed some plugins like the WP Super Cache and WP Fastest Cache. I think they work great.
Sure! You’re right! I wanted to feature the ones I use and prefer.
Hello
With these plugins is possible get 100% score in page speed?
Or we need other extensions
It will help a lot but your page speed score depends on how you set up each page as well. A website with no image and medias will have a good score, but you won’t have too much visitors. The best is to find a good balance. No need to focus only on a page speed score. Cheers!
Very nice collection. The first thing I learned about speeding up a website is when I ran across this guide: # and learned about image optimization, and it really does help. My site is mostly about photography and I post a lot of photos that are high quality, so it came as quite a help to lower that a bit and speed up the site. Now I wanted to find more tips like that, and your guide really helps! Thank you! 🙂
Amazing to know that this post comes from one of my favorite theme developers just as I am digging in to my site to work on making it faster. I’d love to know more about Autooptimize, specifically, how to find the CSS above the fold for the inline CSS function.
Also- What if I want to optimize my images with photoshop and re-upload them to my server? What is the best size/compression setting for basic images? WordPress scales them down and makes thumbnails, so is it best to upload large images 2500px wide? Or is that too big?
Jpeg compression should be lossless, but how much is too much?
Thanks a lot for the kind words! Much appreciated.
For Autoptimize, the best is to disable the “Also aggregate inline CSS” option in the CSS section.
About images, export them from photoshop choosing the “Export for the web” option, in 60 or 80 depending on the image purpose and context. e.i a background doesn’t need much details. Around 1500px wide is enough for the original image.
The default Ewww settings works fine for me.
I hope it will help!
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