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7 Best Plugins for Website Optimization
The popularity of WordPress as a Content Management System has been on the rise, with over 44% of all websites powered by WordPress. This impressive adoption rate has brought about the development of various enhancements and added features. These features are aimed at making WordPress better at helping those who use it to reach their goals. This article aims to discuss the best WordPress plugins for website optimization. It will shed more light on the plugins that will make your website load faster and become more optimized.
What is Website Optimization?
Website optimization is the practice of enhancing a website’s performance and efficiency. There are several types and techniques for website optimization, one of which is WordPress plugins. We’ll look at some of the greatest WordPress plugin solutions in this post.
What are WordPress plugins?
WordPress plugins are tools that aid the addition of various WordPress installation features to a WordPress site. WordPress plugins come in the form of downloadable software to a WordPress site. WordPress plugins supply effective solutions for your website to perform some functions better while giving room for customizations. The amount of coding or technical ability needed is brought to the barest minimum.
At this point, it must be noted that well over 56000 plugins are available for download to your WordPress. These vast numbers of plugins all differ in functionalities, but some of them are very essential plugins for your website to function optimally. We could put these plugins into distinct categories based on their functions.
Although this piece is aimed at talking about the best WordPress plugins for website optimization, it would only be fair to point out that there are others like
- WordPress plugins for cache
- WordPress plugins for security features
- WordPress plugins for chat
- WordPress plugins for quizzes and a host of others.
WordPress plugins for website optimization
WordPress plugins for website optimization are tools that can be added to a website to improve the website’s performance. They are also used to increase your website’s speed and enhance the user experience of your website. WordPress plugins ensure that any prospects or customers visiting your website get attracted to what they meet. It aims to ensure your customers commit to your website through what they find on your website.
It must be noted that SEO has become an extremely critical aspect of all website optimizations.
As we move along, we will discuss the best WordPress plugins for website optimization to increase the performance of your website.
Listed below are examples of WordPress plugins for website optimization
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WP Rocket:
The speed with which your site loads up is a critical factor to consider if you want your site to be ranked higher by a search engine. If your competitor’s website is faster than yours, there is a greater chance of them becoming more visible than yours. Placing huge importance on how the speed of your website affects it is logical.
Features of WP Rocket
- Minify HTML, Javascript and CSS
- Web Page cache
- Image lazy loading
- CDN Integration
- GZIP compression
- Browser caching
- And lots More.
All the above features are present to ensure your site’s performances are boosted instantly. This WordPress plugin for optimization also allows you to load images more efficiently.
Wp-Rocket Pricing
WP-Rocket pricing Starts at $49/year for a website to $249/year.
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W3 Total Cache:
WordPress plugin that speeds up the loading of pages by caching static files and eliminating the need to send requests to the server for each page load. This plugin is available as a free download from the wordpress plugin repository, and it is one of the most popular plugins with over 1 million active installs.
Features of W3 Total Cache
- Automatic CDN support
- Minify HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Image lazy loading
- Database Caching
- And Lots More.
W3 Total Cache Pricing
W3 Total Comes at a price of $99/site, which makes it seems pricey when compared to other plugins of similar standard such as wp-rocket. Although there is a FREE version that you can download from the WordPress directory.
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Lite Speed Cache
This is a WordPress caching plugin that helps increase the speed at which a WordPress site is being accessed. The plugin caches the web pages on your site that are often changing due to updates. This is necessary to allow the page to load faster whenever anyone tries to access it. It serves as a bridge between the web app and the cache engine. This tool is also immensely useful for optimizing images and lazy loading of images.
Features of Lite Speed Cache
- Automatic page caching
- Automatic page purging
- Image optimization
- Image lazy loading
- Multiple CDN support
- Minify HTML, javascript and CSS
- And Lots More.
Lite Speed Cache Pricing
Lite Speed Cache is a FREE plugin and you can download it here.
- Short Pixel Images found on the site are there to be informative and keep visitors engaged, but what good would these images do if they are loaded slowly due to their size? As a WordPress plugin, Short Pixel allows you to compress images into smaller sizes without losing the quality of the images. Short Pixel makes your site look great, but with a faster load time.
Features of Short Pixel
- Automatically scale down large images.
- Ability to choose image optimization level
- Automatic Backup
- Serve Webp and Avif to compliant browser
- Convert PNG and GIF to JPG.
Short Pixel Pricing
Short pixel pricing starts at $9.99 for 10,000 images and also comes with a FREE plan with a limit of 100 images per month.
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Hummingbird
This is a performance plugin for WordPress Optimization. This has been developed to improve the overall performance of your WordPress site. Your site will also become more user-friendly with this WordPress plugin for optimization. It is tasked with scanning and fixing all sorts of issues responsible for slowing down your site. It is, in fact, a tool that is out there to make your site perform better than you could ever imagine.
Features of Hummingbird
- Complete cache suite to speed up your website load speed
- Fast Content Distribution Network (CDN) for file optimization
- Gzip file compression
- Cloudflare integration
Hummingbird WordPress Pricing
Hummingbird comes at a starting price of $5/month to $15.83/month. They also offer a 21-Day FREE Trial.
- Autoptimize This is a WordPress plugin for optimization that minifies your website’s JavaScript and CSS files so that it can function better. It removes unwanted characters from the source code without altering its functionality. It is also great at improving the speed of your website. This plugin is also good with lazy loading and optimization of images. With all the joint features of Autoptimize, your website will respond to clicks fast.
Features of Autoptimize WordPress Plugin
- It caches scripts and styles
- Light weight and easy to setup
- page caching
- Image optimization
Autoptimize Pricing
- Jetpack
This is a WordPress plugin for optimizing the speed of your website while also improving the security of your website. The combined features and functions mentioned above about this plugin make it quite indispensable. The credibility of this plugin is boosted by the fact that WordPress.com’s parent company, Automatic, developed it. Jetpack improves the speed of your website by saving images on your website on Jetpack’s servers.
With Jetpack, your website will be protected against spam. It will also create backups for your website, and it will scan for malware on your website. Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that is quite well stocked to give you the optimization edge you need for your website.
Features of JetPack WordPress Plugin
- Image CDN
- Image lazy loading
- Protection against brute force attack
- Automatic website backup
- Two-factor authenticator (2FA)
- And Lots More
Jectpack Pricing
Jectpack has a starter price of $3.95/ month, and also comes with a FREE plan.
Wrapping it Up
Optimizing your website is of top priority as it contributes to better performance and user experience. It is very essential to note that having all the above plugins on your website at the same time will result in nothing but chaos. You only need one or two of these plugins coupled with some other web optimization practices to properly optimize your website.
I strongly recommend using WP-Rocket since it has lots of essential features you need for your website optimization and also offers CDN services for an extra little fee.
FAQ About WordPress Wesbite Optimization
How to Run a WordPress Speed Test
You can check the speed of your wordpress website by using a number of different tools. One popular tool is the Pingdom website speed test. This tool allows you to test the speed of your website from different locations around the world. You can also use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to check your website’s speed and performance.
How to Optimize WordPress for mobile
The most important factor to optimize your WordPress website for mobile is the loading speed. Your website has to load fast on mobile and the design has to be optimized for mobile devices’ screens.
What Are WordPress Website Testing Tools?
There are several free tools you can employ to test your wordpress website, and these include;
- GT Metrix
- Pingdom
- Google Page Speed Insight
- And Many More
How To Optimize WordPress Theme
The best way to optimize your WordPress theme is by choosing an optimized and mobile-friendly theme right from the initial stage of your website design, and also optimizing your website content such as images.
Another interesting plugin for image optimization: https://wordpress.org/plugins/optipic/ Its automatic convert image to Webp (for webp-supported browsers) and compressed/optimized png/jpeg (for webp-unsupported browsers).