How to Enhance the Speed of a WordPress Website Using Plugins

There is no doubt regarding the fact that WordPress is one of the most used CMS when considered globally. The CMS comprises around 30% of the entire world’s websites. But in case the website is loaded with heavy content and has lots of visitors, it turns out quite slow in the default configuration. On top of that, if a lot of themes and plugins are added to the website, it gets absolutely slow, which might affect the performance of your website to a great extent in an adverse way.

For every website owner, it’s important to remember that maintaining the speed of a website is very important. Since there are too many websites to switch to, there are high chances that the visitors will get frustrated if a site doesn’t get loaded within milliseconds. It’s pretty obvious that a site that loads slowly will lose a significant number of visitors as well as the potential revenue. In fact, the page load time is considered as a factor by Google in its search algorithm. This means the lightweight websites are ranked higher than the sites that load slowly.

In order to improve the speed of a WordPress site, there are some steps that you need to follow –

Check the speed

In order to improve the speed of a website, it’s important to judge whether it’s slow or not. There are a number of popular tools using which you can test the website speed and you should do this quite frequently. Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights are some of the popular free online tools which help check the speed of a website from different locations.

https://tools.pingdom.com/,https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/, http://webpagetest.org/, and http://gtmetrix.com/ are some of the URLs where you can check a number of speed test tools.

Know how the websites get slowed down

Once the speed test is done, you would get certain recommendations regarding how to improve the speed. Since most of these suggestions are full of technical details, it might be difficult for one without a sound technical knowledge to understand these. This is why it’s important to understand the reasons for slowing down. The major factors that cause a website to slow down include web hosting, bad plugins, page size, WordPress configuration and external scripts.

Know why speed is essential

The usual time span for which visitors wait for a site to load is 7 seconds. Hence, if you are planning to cater to a large number of target customers, you need to ensure that your site gets loaded within 7 seconds. Or else. The visitors will leave even before the site is loaded. A slow website means lower traffic and it’s considered as a negative by search engine giants like Google. So if you are planning to generate more subscribers,traffic and revenue from the website , you have to make the website faster.

Want to know how to increase the speed using different plugins? Here is a list of the plugins that might help you achieve the desired speed in different ways –

WP Super Cache: –

This is a helpful plugin which creates the static pages within a website. This help reduces the page serving time, as a result of which, the loading time is minimized, without maintaining the cache. This plugin helps optimize the database by creating static HTML files. This ensures whenever a page is requested, the static pages would be served, making it faster as the time for processing all the PHP scripts is not required.

W3 Total Cache: –

This plugin has a proven record of more than 1 million active downloads and it helps improve the user experience and SEO of the websites by minimizing the download time and improving the performance. The plugin uses a smart feature like content delivery network (CDN) integration. The major benefits of using this plugin include enhanced site performance, increased search engine ranking and around 80% bandwidth savings.

WP Smush.it: –

In case your website is loaded with images and you are clueless about how to compress those without hampering the quality, using this plugin might prove to be a game changer. Once you install this plugin and upload the images, those will be automatically compressed. Moreover, this plugin also compresses the existing images in the WordPress image folder. This proves to be very helpful in minimizing the load time for the existing posts.

WP Fastest Cache: –

If your plan is to boost up the performance of your website, this plugin can prove to be the best choice for you. It comes with a simple design and useful features and helps manage your job without any hassle. As per studies, this plugin has been chosen by more than 400k website owners. This plugin is known to improve the performance of a website up to 5x times.

EWWW Image Optimizer: –

This plugin is a smart alternative to WP Smush.it. This helps optimize the uploaded images and improve the blog speed. With enhanced speed, your website might rank better in the search engines.Moreover, it also helps save bandwidth and storage space. Apart from optimizing the new and existing images, it will also convert the images to the best possible file format. The best features of this plugin are smooth handling, high torque, no speed limit, SSL encryption, free backup store and support for all kind of file format.

If you have a plan to improve the overall performance of your website, using some of this techniques and installing the plugins would help you to a great extent. Make sure you check the speed of your website before and after installing the plugins so that you can track the performance of the plugins.