Just like we all know first impressions matter, your website loading time also matters a lot if the visitor will stay to read what he has come to find on your site.
Imagine you enter a shop to buy a brand of product. You are in the shop and waiting for someone to attend to you but no one seems to be ready to check on you. You have to wait a long time before someone walks up to you.
This experience can be annoying and I am sure you may not even stay longer or once you get out of there you may not come back again for whatsoever reason.
But that is the same for a website that takes too long to load. A visitor will not wait to look at a blank screen when he knows he can go and find the same information on another website.
When someone visits your website, the loading speed can make or break their experience. Slow loading times not only frustrate visitors, but they can also hurt your search engine rankings. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that your WordPress site loads quickly and efficiently.
Thankfully, there are plugins available that can help speed up your site’s loading time significantly. These plugins can optimize your website’s images, cache, and code, and reduce server response time, among other things.
In this article, we’ll explore seven plugins that can make a significant impact on your site’s loading speed. Before we reach there, let us, first of all, see some of the causes of slow website loading time or speed.
What are the causes of a slow website loading time
There are several factors that can cause slow website loading times. Here are some of the most common ones:
1. Large Image Sizes
Images are an essential component of any website, but they can also be a significant contributor to slow loading times. Large images that are not optimized can significantly increase the size of your website, leading to slow page load times.
To ensure that your website loads quickly, it’s essential to compress images before uploading them to your website.
2. Unoptimized Code
Another significant factor that can impact your website’s loading speed is unoptimized code. Bloated or poorly coded themes and plugins can slow down your website.
To ensure that your website’s code is optimized, make sure that you’re using an up-to-date theme and plugins.
If you’re using custom code, consider hiring a professional developer to review your code and make any necessary improvements.
3. Too Many Plugins
Plugins are a fantastic way to add functionality to your website, but too many plugins can also be a significant contributor to slow loading times.
Each plugin you install adds additional code to your website, which can slow down your website’s performance.
To ensure that your website is running as quickly as possible, be selective with the plugins you install and remove any that you don’t need.
4. Poor Hosting
Your web hosting provider can also impact your website’s loading speed. If you’re using a low-quality hosting provider, your website may load slowly or experience downtime.
To ensure that your website loads quickly, choose a reputable hosting provider that can handle your website’s traffic and offers fast server response times.
Managed WordPress hosting providers such as WP Engine, Kinsta, and Flywheel can provide optimized hosting environments for WordPress websites.
5. Lack of Caching
Caching is an effective way to speed up your website by storing frequently accessed data in temporary storage.
By doing so, your website can retrieve data faster, resulting in faster page load times.
There are several caching plugins available for WordPress, such as WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache, that can help you improve your website’s performance.
6. External Resources
External resources such as videos or social media feeds can also slow down your website if they are not optimized correctly.
To ensure that your website loads quickly, make sure that any external resources you’re using are optimized for web use.
If possible, host videos on external video hosting platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo, which can reduce the load on your website’s server.
Plugins to speed up your WordPress website loading time
Before we begin discussing the plugins that can enhance your website’s loading speed, it’s important to note that using too many plugins can have a negative impact on your site and potentially increase its loading time.
Therefore, it’s advisable to only use the essential plugins to prevent any such issues.
1. Speed Booster Pack
The Speed Booster Pack plugin is designed to optimize website loading times by examining and optimizing all parameters related to site speed, including the server and WordPress setup.
This plugin accomplishes this by moving scripts that can slow down page loading to the footer, reducing external render-blocking Javascript and CSS in above-the-fold content, and removing query strings from static resources, which are a common cause of slow loading speeds.
By fine-tuning these factors, the Speed Booster Pack plugin can help improve the overall performance and speed of your website.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer
The EWWW Image Optimizer plugin is a highly efficient tool for accelerating your WordPress site. It operates by automatically optimizing and compressing your images in a lossless manner as you add them to your website.
It is also capable of optimizing images that have already been uploaded to your site.
This feature makes it easy to enhance the performance of your website’s images, resulting in a faster and more streamlined user experience for your visitors.
3. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a caching plugin that has been engineered to optimize the performance of your website with just a few clicks.
With its remarkable features like Delay JavaScript Execution, Remove Unused CSS, and LazyLoad, you can easily enhance your website’s loading speed and improve your Lighthouse performance score.
These features are also essential to improving Core Web Vitals and ensuring a remarkable user experience.
We appreciate WP Rocket for its ability to automatically apply 80% of the best practices in web performance as soon as you activate it.
WP Rocket is an easy-to-use plugin that saves you time and effort in dealing with complex performance issues that are crucial to your website’s success.
4. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache stands out as one of the most comprehensive and effective cache plugins available for WordPress. It addresses a wide range of factors that can impact website performance, going above and beyond the basics of simply reducing CPU usage or bandwidth consumption for HTML pages.
One of the most notable advantages of this plugin is its user-friendly nature. Unlike many other caching solutions, the W3 Total Cache plugin does not require any theme modifications, .htaccess modifications, or programming workarounds to get started. This means that users can get up and running with the plugin quickly and easily, without any headaches.
W3 Total Cache is also the only caching plugin that is designed to optimize all types of hosting environments, regardless of their size. This makes it an incredibly versatile and adaptable solution that can benefit any WordPress site, no matter what its needs may be
5. Gonzales
Gonzales is a powerful yet straightforward tool designed to help you streamline your website by eliminating unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files that are often added by themes and plugins.
With the constant addition of new plugins to your site, it’s easy for your site to become bogged down with files that load every time you open your site, ultimately slowing everything down.
For instance, when you install a contact form, gallery, or slider plugin, it’s likely that it comes with its own style files that may not be required to load on every page.
Fortunately, Gonzales allows you to stop these files from loading on pages where they aren’t needed, leading to significant improvements in your site speed.
By intelligently pausing certain files when they’re not in use, Gonzales helps you achieve a faster, more responsive website that users will love.
6. WP-Optimize
If you’re running a WordPress site, this plugin is a must-have. It’s incredibly important for keeping your site running quickly and smoothly.
By optimizing your database without requiring any manual queries, this plugin helps to remove unnecessary database strings and auto drafts that can slow down your site.
The end result is a faster and more efficient WordPress site that runs like a dream.
7. Smush
Smush is a highly sought-after plugin for optimizing images, which is a critical element in determining the speed of your website.
Whenever you add an image to a page or post, Smush will automatically optimize it asynchronously.
This plugin is also designed to reduce the pixel size of images without compromising their quality, ensuring that users can enjoy smaller file sizes with minimal visual impact.
8. DBManager
If you’re looking to boost the performance of your WordPress website, the DBManager plugin is a valuable tool for managing your database.
With this plugin, you can optimize and repair your database, as well as perform backups and restorations.
You can also use DBManager to delete backup databases, drop or empty tables, and execute specific queries.
Conclusion
For WordPress users, optimizing page speed is an essential task that has significant benefits for both user experience and audience expansion.
Since page speed is a well-known SEO ranking signal, a website that loads faster can potentially increase its organic traffic and improve its visibility.
Therefore, it’s essential to select the appropriate plugins and tools that can assist you in serving and expanding your audience in a smart and effective way.