Top Plugins To Speed Up WordPress 2019 (Caching Plugins And More)
Just how much of an impact 1 second could have on your site could differ but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
There’s plenty other cases for the importance of increasing your websites load time?
For those of that use WordPress, we are in a unique position because we don’t have to be all too technically savvy to see some great improvements in our websites loading time.
This is all thanks to a great selection WordPress plugins that are designed to help you speed up your websites loading time.
Let’s dive in:
Speed enhancing WordPress plugins
Below you’ll find plugins that can make tweaks to your WordPress install to speed up your site.
You’ll also find the usual caching and minifying plugins along with a plugin for lazy loading. And most of them are free.
1. WP Rocket
If there was ever one optimization plugin to rule them all, it would be WP Rocket.
You get all of the caching functionality you’d expect, along with a bunch of features you probably wouldn’t expect.
… All wrapped in the most user-friendly interface I’ve seen in a plugin like this.
Where some caching plugins seem to require you to study an entire course to figure it out – WP Rocket makes the setup process real easy by comparison.
I love that it includes features you’d normally have to install a few extra plugins for. For example, you get image lazy loading, database optimization, and even the ability to host Google Analytics code on your own site.
This plugin is well worth exploring if you want a speed optimization plugin that does it all.
Features:
- User-friendly interface
- Minimal tweaking required for speed improvements
- Minify CSS, HTML and Javascript
- Page caching
- Cache pre-load
- Image lazy loading
- Advanced caching rules
- Database optimization
- CDN integration
- Direct Cloudflare integration
- Google Analytics integration to load the code from your server
- Settings import and export
- Version rollback
Price: From $39/year
2. Perfmatters
Perfmatters takes a different approach to improving page load times than most plugins on this list.
By default, WordPress has certain options enabled that aren’t necessary for most sites and slow down performance. Perfmatters makes it possible to disable these options with the click of a few buttons.
But, the biggest thing that tends to slow down the rendering of your pages is HTTP requests that aren’t needed.
This plugin also allows you to disable these scripts on a per page basis. This means you can stop plugins from loading code where it isn’t needed.
So, even if you have a caching plugin – this is well worth using as well.
Features:
- Works with your existing caching plugin
- Disable WordPress options that are slowing your site down
- Disable scripts on per page basis
- DNS pre-fetch support
- Lightweight plugin
Price: Starts from $19.95/year
3. WP Fastest Cache
Some plugins are too basic, others are too advanced – the developer of this plugin has definitely found the middle ground.
Just install, activate and run through the settings. Then hit save and you’re ready to go.
I especially like how easy it is to set cache expiration times for certain URL strings.
And it gets better, because this plugin is used by over 200,000 people and receives great reviews on WordPress.org.
Features:
- Easy setup
- 1-click to clear cache and/or minified CSS etc
- Minify CSS and HTML
- Set posts/pages to exclude (some like admin area excluded by default)
- Set expiration times for all posts/pages or certain URL strings
- CDN integration
- Premium version available with extra features
Price: Free
4. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a great plugin from the team at KeyCDN.
It’s a light weight caching plugin that you can setup in minutes.
It comes with the option to set cache expiry time, minification setup and a few other options. Other than that, it’s sparce on features but that’s the entire point of this plugin.
If you need to add a CDN, you can use the sister plugin to this called CDN Enabler. Same principle applies – light weight and easy to setup.
Features:
- Simple setup
- 1-click to clear cache
- Set cache behaviour (e.g. clearing after new posts)
- Minification feature
- Set post ID’s to exclude from cache
- Set expiration times
Price: Free
5. WP Super Cache
This is one of the most widely used caching plugins available for WordPress. At the time of writing this post it has had over 5.5 million downloads.
It’s straight forward to setup but has some settings for advanced users which can be used to get more out of the plugin.
Features:
- Support for multiple caching types (Mod_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy)
- Serve static html files
- Cache preload
- CDN support
Price: Free
6. W3 Total Cache
This is another popular speed enhancing plugin. It goes beyond just being a simple caching plugin. It’s a complete framework.
There’s a huge array of options and various caching methods that are supported.
There’s advanced support for CloudFlare and various CDN services.
But, the reality is that because there are so many options, it’s not the easiest to setup. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could break something. That’s why only advanced users should use this plugin.
It’s also worth noting that uninstalling this plugin can be tricky – it takes more than the typical deactivating and deleting to get rid of it.
Features:
- CDN Support
- Browser caching
- Database caching
- Object caching
- Minifying
- And lots more
Price: Free
7. WP Super Minify
The idea of minifying is to combine JS, HTML and CSS files so that they can be compressed and served to visitors in a way that reduces website loading times.
It’s worth noting that you should be very careful when setting up these types of plugins, in the past I have found that sometimes particular themes and plugins can conflict with this type of plugin.
WP Super Minify gives you the option to disable compression of JavaScript and/or CSS just in case there are any conflicts.
Features:
- Minifies JavaScript, CSS and HTML
- Option to disable compression of CSS/JavaScript
- Extremely straight forward and easy to use.
Price: Free
8. WP Smush.it
This plugin is based on the Yahoo Smush.it service which is used to optimize images and remove unnecessary bytes from image files.
Most tools use ‘lossy’ formats which degrade quality, but this uses lossless formats so you won’t be able to notice any difference in quality.
I tried this plugin a long time ago and it didn’t work very well due to the fact that there were some bugs in the plugin.
Actually at the time, it broke all of my image thumbnails but thankfully there’s a plugin called ‘Regenerate Thumbnails’ that fixed the issue on my site within 5 minutes, so no harm done.
It’s worth noting that this happened a long time ago and since then the plugins development has been taken over by WPMU DEV’s team.
Features:
- Strips un-used colour from images
- Strips meta data from JPEG’s (this isn’t needed anyway)
- Optimizing JPEG compression
- Integrates with the Smush.it API
- Choose to run existing images through the plugin
Price: Free
9. BJ Lazy Load
Usually when a visitor hits your website and tries to load a page it will load the entire page.
If it’s a long page with lots of images this can cause your loading times to skyrocket.
The truth is that you don’t actually need the entire page to load at the same time, especially images which usually take the most time to load.
The idea of ‘lazy loading’ is that specific elements are only loaded when they are needed.
Features:
- Replaces post images, Gravatar images and post thumbnails
- Replaces content iframes with a placeholder until content needs to load
- Plugin uses jQuery to operate
- Serves scaled down images with responsive designs
Price: Free
Bonus: 5 top tools to test the speed of your website
This post is all about showing you WordPress plugins that you use for caching your website, minifying elements of your site and setting up things like lazy loading – all plugins that will speed up the page loading times of your website.
And I was originally going to keep it that way but I think it’s important to share a few none-WordPress tools that you can use to measure the speed of your site.
These types of tools work by just entering your websites URL into the tool and running the test.
Here are 5 tools to get you started:
