8 Best WordPress Plugins To Make Your Site Faster

The faster your WordPress site runs, the better experience visitors to your site will have. Research shows that page loading time has an influence on conversion rates and on whether or not visitors will leave your site and go somewhere else.

One of the nice things about the Internet is that there are hundreds of sites that offer the same service. One the downside, if your site loads slowly, you can guarantee that visitors will leave your site and find someone else who offers the same service but just has a site that loads faster.

There are multiple plug-ins that you can use to make a slow page load faster. In this brief guide we are going to review eight plug-ins. While plugins will help your site decrease loading time and avoid excessive HTTP requests server side, a study by Aussie Hosting showed that hosts who had instances of downtime more than four times per week had a significant negative impact on site performance regardless of any third party tweaks. Let’s get started.

1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is considered by many to be the best optimization plug-in currently available. It offers users a number of features that one would expect from a plug-in of this type. But it also offers a variety of features that you might be surprised to see in this type of plug-in.

WP Rocket sets itself apart from the competition in that it does not require you to go through an in-depth tutorial or to study the entire plug-in before you are able to use it. It has an easy set up process.

Some of the features of this plug-in include:

• Page caching
• Lazy image loading
• Database optimization
• CDN integration
• Google analytics integration
• User-friendly interface

2. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a great tool for optimization that has a number of intuitive features and a user interface that’s easy to master. When you look at a number of the plug-ins for optimization, you will see that they are either too simple to be effective or so complicated that they take years to master. WP Fastest Cache has been designed to sit in that perfect middle ground.
You simply need to install the plug-in, review the installation settings, hit Save, and you are ready to optimize your page. This plug-in is currently being used by hundreds of thousands of individuals, and it has phenomenal reviews on WordPress.org. Some of the features you will appreciate about this plug-in include:

• It is easy to set up
• CDN integration
• Free/premium versions available
• Minify CSS and HTML

3. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is unbelievably popular. This plug-in is used by more than 5.5 million individuals. Some of the reasons why it’s so popular include its ease-of-use and the advanced features that are available for more tech-savvy users who want to get more out of the product.

Features you will appreciate include:

• CDN support
• Cache preload
• Supports multiple caching types
• Serve static HTML files

4. WP Super Minify
This plug-in helps improve the performance of your WordPress site by utilizing minifying. This is where your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files are combined and compressed so that they can be presented to your visitors in a way that reduces load times.

Using this plug-in may require a little bit of technical knowledge on the part of the user. This is because there are certain WordPress themes and plug-ins that do not work well with minifying. WP Super Minify lets you disable compression for CSS, JavaScript, or both if there are conflicts.

The primary features of this plug-in include:

• Enable or disable compression of CSS/JavaScript
• User-friendly, straightforward layout
• Minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

5.  WP-Optimize
This plug-in helps speed up your site by getting rid of junk files stored in your database. This could include things like spam, trash, post revisions, etc. When these junk files accumulate, they will slow down your WordPress site. The idea is to run this plug-in a couple of times a month. WP-Optimize comes with the option to automatically schedule database cleanups.
With WP-Optimize, you will be able to select the best cleanup options to meet your needs. For example, you can opt to remove spam or unapproved comments. You can clean up your auto draft posts or the posts you have in trash.

This plug-in is so easy to use. All that you need to do is:

• Backup your database
• Do the plug-in install
• Click on the WP-Optimize tab
• Run the plug-in using default or specified settings

6. Imagify
Images are what take up the vast majority of your bandwidth. You need to have images on your site for it to be attractive. Imagify is designed to provide you with ways to compress your images and still maintain high quality images. It helps to resize oversized images, gets rid of excess data in your images, and improves the overall loading speed of your site.

You will get 25 MB for free every month. Once you go over that limit, you can select the premium plan for $4.99, or you can wait until the next month to reset your limit.

7. WP Disable
This plug-in is a must for anyone who is concerned about disabling unnecessary features in WordPress core. These unnecessary features can slow down loading times.

Other features of this plug-in included the ability to:

• Remove query strings
• Load fonts asynchronously
• Locally host Google Analytics tracking

8. GTMetrix For WordPress
GTMetrix For WordPress is a phenomenal tool that monitors your load time and your page speed. Your YSlow scores are compiled, and then a report is sent to your WordPress dashboard. You can opt to have scheduled email reports sent as well.

You are provided with overview reports and a detailed report indicating what elements on your page are causing it to slow down. Armed with this information, you are able to make adjustments to your site so that it offers a more pleasing experience to your visitors.
So there you have it, our eight recommendations for WordPress plug-ins to make your site faster. We know that there are a number of plug-ins that we did not include in this list. We would love to hear from you. What WordPress plug-ins are you currently using to optimize your site? Let us know in the comments section below.