According to research, it is found that a delay of only 100-millisecond in site loading time can cause a conversion rate drop by up to 7%.
Also, WordPress powers around 40% of all websites around the world that mean optimizing your WordPress blog is very essential in terms of both rankings and conversions.
To optimize the site for better speed, the best option is to use several plugins that are trusted by millions of WordPress users. In this article, I am going to list the top WordPress speed optimization plugins.
Here are the best WordPress plugins for speed optimization:
1- WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress that helps you boost your website performance through various methods. WP Rocket is trusted by over 1 million websites. It is also compatible with almost every theme and plugin.
Top Features
- WP Rocket allows you to make your website fast by creating static HTML files and applying browser caching so that whenever a user opens your site, it could load fast.
- By using it, you can minify and optimize the CSS and JavaScript files of your website. This helps you optimize for Core Web Vitals metrics including LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and FID (First Input Delay).
- You can use the LazyLoad feature that defers the loading of images and iframes by leaving them off-screen till the user needs them.
- To speed up your site, it offers various functions to optimize your site database. For example, you can clean posts, comments, transients, and can also optimize database tables. Moreover, you have the option to run cleanups automatically.
- If you are targeting an international audience on your site then you can integrate your CDN with WP Rocket in a few clicks. Besides, you can also use WP Rocket’s custom CDN, Rocket CDN.
- WP Rocket also supports Cloudflare and Securi integrations.
- By using GZIP Compression, you can compress or decrease the size of your site files that help your site load fast.
Pricing
WP Rocket is a premium plugin that costs $49 for 1 website. However, if you want to use it on unlimited sites, you can purchase its Infinite plan at $249.
Related: Best Ways To Increase Site Speed
2- WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a popular caching plugin for WordPress that is provided by Automattic. It has more than 2 million active installations on WordPress. It helps you boost your site speed by serving static HTML files instead of heavy PHP scripts.
Top Features
- WP Super Cache allows you to use CND (Content Delivery Network) on your website that serves files of your site servers that are close to visitors.
- By using Preload Mode, you can make cached files of your posts, categories, and tags that can be served whenever any visitor visits your website.
- With the use of Garbage Collection, you can delete old cache files from the cache directory on a regular basis. This is very important if you have limited space.
Pricing
WP Super Cache is free to use.
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3- W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a leading speed optimization plugin for WordPress with more than 1 million active installations on WordPress. W3 Total Cache is trusted by millions of web developers and publishers to optimize websites.
Top Features
- W3 Total Cache is fully compatible with shared, virtual and dedicated hostings.
- By using W3 Total Cache, you get transparent CDN (Content Delivery Network) management that improves site loading speed.
- You can save up to 80% of your bandwidth by minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
- W3 Total Cache also supports AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
- It allows you to cache almost everything including pages, posts, files, categories, tags, search results, tags, objects, and fragments on memory or disk.
- W3 Total Cache used caching methods that include Redis, Disk, Memcached, eAccelerator, WinCache, and XCache.
- It also allows you to defer non-critical CSS and Javascript files for rendering pages.
- By using the LazyLoad feature, you can defer off-screen images that improve user experience.
Pricing
W3 Total Cache is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Blog
4- Smush
Smush is a 5-star rating WordPress plugin that every WordPress blog owner should install. It helps you optimize your images by using various methods that help you improve the site’s Google PageSpeed score. It is provided by a team of WPMU DEV.
Top Features
- Smush is compatible with almost every theme or plugin you are using on your WordPress website.
- By using the Bulk Smush feature, you can optimize and compress up to 50 images at a time. Moreover, Smush uses lossless compression that means your images will not lose quality while compressing.
- You can defer all the offscreen images with just one click by using the Lazy Load feature.
- It also allows you to set custom maximum width and height and while compressing large images, they will get the scale down automatically.
- You can use the inbuilt “Incorrect Size Image Detection” tool that helps you find big size images that are slowing down your site speed.
- Moreover, it enables you to compress images from directories that are not in the media library.
- You can use Smush’s “Automated Optimization” that auto-optimises images after uploading them into the media library.
- Smush doesn’t come with any monthly limits that means you can optimize unlimited images of up to 5MB in size.
- Smush supports all types of image formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP.
- You can also convert and serve your JPEG or PNG files in next-gen image format WebP.
Pricing
Smush is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Image Optimization
5- Imagify
Imagify is yet another popular optimization plugin for WordPress. It helps you compress and optimize images without losing image quality.
Top Features
- It automatically creates a WebP version of images after every image optimization. This also includes image thumbnails.
- Imagify allows you to convert images in next-gen formats including WebP and JPEG 2000/XR that boost your site speed.
- There are no restrictions on image optimizations that means you can compress and optimize unlimited images.
- By using it, you can optimize multiple file-formats including JPG, PNG, GIF, and even PDF.
- While optimizing images, Imagify automatically resizes your images so that you don’t have to waste time manually resizing images.
Pricing
Imagify is free to use.
Related: Best Image Gallery Plugins For WordPress
6- NitroPack
NitroPack is an all-in-one speed optimization plugin for WordPress. It offers everything you need to speed up your websites such as caching, CDN, and image optimization.
Top Features
- NitroPack serves static assets of your site through CDN based on Amazon’s CloudFront service.
- It allows you to optimize and convert images to WebP automatically.
- NitroPack works on copies of your site’s file which means there is no risk of damaging your original site files.
- By using it, you can optimize all the resources that are linked to your theme, either its CSS or JS files.
- It helps you minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with just one click.
- You are enabled to Lazy Load images and iframes on your site.
- NitroPack also allows you to exclude any specific pages or resources from being cached.
- NitroPack comes with the support of Cloudflare and Securi integrations.
Pricing
NitroPack is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Membership
7- Asset CleanUp
Asset CleanUp is used by over 100k WordPress users to optimize site speed. It aims to do more than just minifying and combining CSS and JavaScript files.
Top Features
- Asset CleanUp helps you find and detect all the unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files that you don’t need on any page.
- You can preload CSS, JS, and Google fonts on browsers to speed up your website.
- Not you can only minify CSS and JavaScript files but Asset CleanUp also allows you to minify inline codes (code within STYLE and SCRIPT tag).
- Asset CleanUp works best in combination with popular cache plugins like WP Total Cache or WP Rocket.
- To speed up your site, you can combine all Google fonts on your website into fewer requests.
- Asset CleanUp allows you to choose from 3 font delivery methods: Web Font Loader (webfont.js), Asynchronous, or Render-blocking.
- Moreover, you can preload Google fonts from fonts.gstatic.com.
- It also enables you to remove all the useless links, HTML comments and meta tags from the header and footer of your site.
Pricing
Asset CleanUp is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Testimonials
8- OMGF
OMGF is Optimize My Google Fonts that is an essential WordPress plugin to host Google fonts locally. By using it, you can surely get a good score in Google PageSpeed and GTmetrix.
Top Features
- OMGF cache your fonts using Google Fonts Helper API to minimize DNS requests that improve site speed.
- You can automatically replace or remove Google fonts throughout your whole site.
- OMGF combines all Google font stylesheets that are requested by theme or plugin into one file.
- OMGF also supports AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Pricing
OMGF is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Live Chat
9- ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is the best image optimization plugin that comes with almost every feature you need to make your images lighter. It has more than 300k active installations on WordPress.
Top Features
- ShortPixel offers both lossy and lossless compression for multiple image types including JPG, PNG, GIF, AVIF, and WebP.
- You can convert your JPEG, PNG, and GIF to WebP and AVIF image formats for good site speed.
- Apart from featured images, you are also allowed to optimize thumbnails with the option to exclude specific thumbnails.
- You can also run the ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin on multiple sites with just a single API.
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer is compatible with all the major web hosting providers like WP Engine.
- There is no file size limit in the ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin.
- You also get a monthly image optimization report with stats of image details.
Pricing
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Plugins For Ecommerce Store
10- WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache
WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache is a caching plugin developed by Optimole. It allows you to integrate your Cloudflare free or paid plan with the plugin.
Top Features
- It can work with any of Cloudflare plans including free, pro, business, or enterprise plans.
- It allows you to select or exclude what you want to cache and what you don’t want to cache.
- Apart from CSS and JavaScript files, the WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache plugin also allows you to compress HTML pages generated by WordPress.
- By using it, you are able to preload pages based on sitemaps, page URLs, and the last 20 published contents.
- This plugin can integrate with several popular hosts including WP Engine, Kinsta, and SpinupWP.
- It is fully compatible with leading eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
Pricing
WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache is free to use.
Related: Top WordPress Table Plugins
11- Disqus Conditional Load
If you are using the Disqus commenting system on your website then you should install Disqus Conditional Load plugin on your WordPress blog.
Top Features
- You can Lazy Load Disqus comments using OnClick and OnScroll user action.
- Disqus Conditional Load allows you to load your Disqus comments anywhere on your website using shortcode.
- You also get a separate Disqus comments widget that you can add to your site.
- Lazy Load Disqus aims not to use only JavaScript rather than jQuery that speed up your site speed.
Pricing
Disqus Conditional Load is free to use.
Related: Best WordPress Push Notification Plugins
12- AMP
AMP is the most useful WordPress plugin that you should use for speed optimization. AMP is used by over 500k WordPress users.
Top Features
- It offers you different validation tools that help you deal with all the AMP related issues.
- AMP can be used by both developer and non-developer users as it offers various AMP tools.
- It allows you to serve AMP pages to users through various templates like Standard, Transitional, and Reader.
- AMP supports almost every popular WordPress plugins like Newspack or Astra.
Pricing
AMP is free to use.
13- Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a web performance plugin for WordPress. It is a very lightweight plugin that increases your site speed by reducing the number of HTTP requests.
Top Features
- Perfmatters allows you to apply many options with just one click toggle options including disabling embeds, emojis, and dash icons.
- It comes with a powerful “Script Manager” that allows you to disable scripts per post or page.
- You can also optimize your database on a regular basis.
- It allows you to enable Lazy Loading on images, iframes, and videos from sources like YouTube.
- Perfmatters also allow you to change the default WordPress login URL that keeps your site safe from hackers.
- You can enable CDN rewrite and all of your resources and assets will point to your CDN.
- Moreover, you can host your Google Analytics locally to speed up your website.
- It also allows you to host your Google fonts locally.
Pricing
Perfmatters costs $24.95 per year for 1 website but if you need to use it for unlimited sites, you can purchase at $124.95 per year.
Related: Best Affiliate Marketing Plugins For WordPress
Conclusion
You can use any of the above plugins for speed optimization as all of these offer various features that are powerful enough to boost your site speed. Also, the majority of these plugins can be used free of cost.
