Are you struggling to get your WordPress website to load fast? Want to increase your website’s speed?
Explore the most popular WordPress site speed optimization plugins that you can use to boost your website speed.
1. WP Rocket (Premium)
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 really 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
2. 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 set-up. 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
3. WP Super Cache
This is one of the most widely used caching plugins available for WordPress. It’s straightforward to set-up 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
4. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache comes with a great set of features, balanced with ease of use.
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.
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
5. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a lightweight 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.
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 the cache
- Set expiration times
If you’re struggling to speed up your WordPress installation, just installing a few of these plugins can have a dramatic improvement on your page load times.
It’s important to point out that you shouldn’t go ahead and install all of these. Only install what you need and remember that less is more. It’s definitely true that there are other ways to speed up your site but some of these plugins are a great way to start.
