There are literally thousands of plugins you can choose from for your WordPress website. But it doesn’t mean you should go and install every plugin out there that catches your fancy. That’s just going to slow your website down especially when you get plugins conflicting with each other.
Resolving plugin conflict is a time-consuming endeavor, so it’s really not going to help you out with speeding your site. When it comes to plugins, more doesn’t equal speed. You only need the essentials. Here are some of them:
- Caching plugin
A caching plugin will help your site load faster since your server won’t be serving your website files everytime someone lands on your site. Your plugin will help minimize your server’s workload.
While there are quite a number of good caching plugins out there, the most popular ones are
- W3 Total Cache (https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache)
- WP Super Cache (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache), and
- WP Fastest Cache (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache).
- Lazy load plugin
Lazy loading basically means not loading your entire website all at once. If you’ve got long articles peppered with images and video, your site will be slower than normal. That’s because your server has to send all the files at once.
With a lazy loading plugin, however, your browser will only show above-the-fold content first. The rest of your website will be only shown when your visitor scrolls down the page. This effectively helps save bandwidth as well as speed up your site in the process.
Some of the top lazy load plugins are:
- a3 Lazy Load (https://wordpress.org/plugins/a3-lazy-load)
- BJ Lazy Load (https://wordpress.org/plugins/bj-lazy-load)
- Minification plugin
Minification is one of the best ways to optimize and make your WordPress site run faster. All unnecessary characters in your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files are removed. This reduces the file size and consumes less bandwidth to transmit. Some of the top minification plugins are:
- WP Super Minify (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-minify)
- Autoptimize (https://wordpress.org/plugins/autoptimize)
- Image compression plugin
If you upload lots of images to your site, then you can certainly benefit from an image compression plugin. For best results, however, it’s best if you resize your photos first to make it optimized for the web.
This means if you’ve got images that are more than 2000 pixels, then it’s best you resize it to a size less than that. Your image compression plugin will then remove all the unnecessary metadata and unused colors from your images. Here are some of the top image compression plugins for your consideration:
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit)
- Imagify Image Optimizer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/imagify)
- ShortPixel Image Optimizer (https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortpixel-image-optimiser)
You’re free to download and test the different plugins mentioned in this list, however, make sure you only choose one from each category and delete the rest, so you don’t slow your site down!
