Want to improve your website speed or reduce things that are slowing your site down?
You need to optimize the speed of your WordPress website.
In this blog, you will get the best WordPress speed optimization tools & plugins that you need! And you’ll find all the great functionalities in these plugins such as Caching, Lazy Loading, Minifying, Image Optimization, and many more.
After all, your traffic, audience, and customers will be happy when they’ll see that your website is working faster!
Why WP Speed Optimization is So important?
Speed optimization is one of many SEO ranking factors. A slow website has a bad impact on both traffic and search engines.
Let me give you a great and real-life example you can have a great UI (User Interface), you have a great SEO strategy, and good SEO friendly content but your website takes too long to load. In this case, would the traffic/visitors prefer to stay on your site?
No, they won’t.
So, you need to load your site fast so that your audience and search engines like your site.
Exciting? Let’s jump into it.
The Best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins Special Note
WP-Rocket: One of the best and highly recommended tools ever. With its great features & easy to use. Also, it would be great if the combination of WP-Rocket and Perfmatters because of their several helpful functionalities.
NitroPack: It offers great performance improvements and is able to automatically fix slow page load times.
1. WP Rocket
Wp-Rocket is an all-in-one best speed optimization performing tool for WordPress. If you’re thinking to take the most useful plugin for your website then wp-rocket will be the best one to speed up your WordPress website.
You’ll get a top-quality user-friendly interface here.
After activating this plugin you will start looking at the benefits.
Wp-Rocket’s interface is designed in such a way that a new user will be able to find all its functionalities very easily.
After activating the plugin you’ll get to see it automatically starts some performance like page caching, Gzip Compression, and Browser cache.
Features:
- Fulfilled with user-friendly interface
- Minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Image Lazy-Loading
- You can pre-load the cache
- Exclude render-blocking JavaScript
- Database optimization
- CDN
- Cloudflare Connectivity
- Tracking options (For Example Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics)
- Delay JS Loading
- It offers also Googles’ Font Optimization
- Import and export of settings
It’s a premium plugin so you have to purchase it then you’ll get the full benefits!
Get WP Rocket
2. Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a WordPress lightweight plugin that you can’t refuse to use.
It helps you disable unnecessary features like JavaScript and CSS To speed up your WP(WordPress) site.
Your WordPress website may contain unnecessary JavaScript or CSS. In this case, The Perfmatters plugin is great for removing them.
With this plugin, it’s possible to remove unnecessary HTTP requests.
This plugin is built with Clean and Lightweight Code. So, Perfmatters is the super lightweight plugin you can say.
You can select the ones you need and deselect the ones you don’t need through its dashboard’s amazing toggling options.
Remember: If you use WP Rocket and Perfmatters together you will get dramatically better output
Features:
- With its Toggling option you can disable unnecessary parts that are slowing your website down.
- Capability to work with your active/existing cache plugin.
- Able to host Google analytics locally.
- Able to connect with CDN.
- Frequently updated.
- Option to disable scripts on a per post and per page basis.
- It allows you to Enable Preconnect or DNS Prefetching as well.
The price of this premium plugin starts from 24.95/year
3. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a website performance plugin that is built by focusing on caching.
You will get the best features and easy-to-use options.
WP Fastest Cache plugin is the best when it comes to WordPress caching plugins.
This plugin is used by over 1+ million people with a huge amount of reviews on wordpress.org.
Features:
- Desktop and Mobile Cache.
- One click to clean the cache.
- Capability to minify HTML & CSS.
- Minify and Cobine JavaScript
- Image optimization with Convert WebP.
- Render Blocking JavaScript
- Lazy Load
It’s a Free and Paid Plugin. However, you may not get all the features that are mentioned above in the Free plan but you can get lots of features on the Paid plan.
4. NitroPack
Nitropack is another best WordPress speed Optimization plugin that I have to say.
You do not need to use several plugins to speed up your wp site because of this plugin.
It provides all the functionality that you need to speed up your website!
The main motive of this platform is to make it super easier to speed up your WordPress blog/website.
If you use Nitropack, you don’t have to worry about using multiple speed optimization plugins because it’s all in one.
Just install it on your website and see how fast it works. And the great thing is after activating it will automatically optimize your website such as CDN, Minification, Image optimization, caching, and more.
With its strong settings, you’ll get to see great improvement in site page load time.
Note: To get NitroPacks all Strong and lightweight settings you have to peek at the premium plan so that it will be possible to see the page speed of 90+.
Features:
- Capability to work with WordPress and other CMS platforms.
- Automatic Speed Optimization Algorithm.
- Multiple caching types like Browser and Page.
- Image Optimization system.
- Included Global CDN(Content Delivery Network)
- HTML. CSS, and JavaScript Code minification
- Compression (HTML, CSS, and JS)
Price: The FREE plane is available for very small websites. However, a “Powered By” badge will be shown in the footer sanction but the paid plan removes the footer badge plus lots of top features.
5. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is one of the most used and Free Caching plugins for WordPress. This plugin has over 2 million active installations.
It would be the best one for those who are newbies. you just need to install and check one by one feature.
Also, you’ll get some extra advanced features to get a little more control.
Features:
- Easy to configure
- It supports CDN
- Preload Caches
- Cache Rebuild
- Capability to Extra Homa page checks.
Pricing: It’s Free
6. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a great WP caching plugin that is very easy to use. Top of all it helps improve site speed faster.
It helps you clear your smart cache automatically and manually.
I suggest you use this plugin if your site is very small however you can get better results.
Features:
- Easy setup
- Fast cache engine
- Fast clear cache with just one click
- WebP Support
- Manually cache clearing option
- Support of minification for HTML exclude and CSS/JS Include.
Price: FREE
7. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another popular free but powerful speed-enhancing caching plugin.
You’ll see various array options with the caching systems that are fully supported for speed optimization.
As I’ve said that there are lots of options in this plugin you’ll see and these are not easy to setup if you’re a complete beginner and you do not have enough idea about its options, You could make mistakes and break something. From this point of view, I recommend not to use the beginners but Advanced users can use this plugin.
Features:
- Browser Caching
- Page Caching
- Content Delivery Network(CDN) Support.
- Caching for objects also
- Minification of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- fragments Caching in memory or in Disk
- And many more
Price: Free
8. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is yet another popular speed booster performance plugin that caches your website, Compresses your images, and cleans your site database.
It can be said, It is an all-in-one plugin speed optimization.
It is a freemium plugin, there are free and paid plans you see. However, if you take the Premium plan it will dramatically improve your website loading speed.
Features:
- Cache Pages
- It removes all the unnecessary data from your site
- Image Optimization (Reduces image size by compressing)
- Lazy Load
- Schedule Cleanup
- Minification of Codes with deferring JavaScript.
- And so on
Price: You can take the FREE version from wordpress.org. Paid plans start from $49.
9. Autoptimize
Autoptimize is another helpful free plugin to speed up your wp site.
It has a great ability to carry out various functionalities. Below you can see in the features section…
Features:
- Minification of your site codes
- Removes unnecessary JS codes
- Lazy-load Image
- Google Font Optimization
- And Defer JS Loading
Price: This is a freemium plugin. So you can choose from a free or premium plan.
10. Smush
Smush plays an important role in complete image optimization and it’s a powerful plugin by WPMU dev.
As you know that image size has a negative impact on website loading speed, Smash removes your worries. With the Smash plugin, you can do very precise image optimization.
So, take advantage of Smash and compress the image size precisely.
Features:
- Lossless Compression.
- Lazy Load.
- Image Resize: you can set a max width & Hight.
- Bulk Smash.
- Integrates Gutenberg Block
- Smush CDN option
Price: Free
Get Smush Free
Bonus: How to test your WordPress website speed?
In this article, we have discussed specific plugins to speed up a WordPress website.
Since we know that using a plugin increases the speed of our WP site, in addition to this, we also need to know what the speed of our site is.
It is very important to know your website speed. Here I’m sharing 4 tools to measure website speed clearly.
You just need to put your website URL and start testing then this type of tool will show you a report of your website speed.
Here are 4 tools to test your site speed
Here I have to say, out of this list of four tools Google’s PageSpeed Insight is a very important and useful tool. Because of its data plus it shows your Core Web Vitals.
As you’ve learned all the best tools and plugins to improve your WP site speed. So, you should also have a look at these article below…
Besides as an SEO guy you can’t reduce reading the article of “How to Stay up-to-date with the latest SEO Trends Every Time.”
Final Thoughts
Hope you’ve got all the best WordPress speed optimization plugins and tools. I think if you work with these plugins you’ll be able to enhance the Speed of your WP site.
Although you don’t need all the tools mentioned above because all the tools work almost the same.
Again though these are the best plugins but you should choose the best plugins among them to increase your website speed.
And if you’re still undecided on the best, I’d suggest using a combination of WP-Rrocket and Perfmatters, and Nitropack is another great plugin.
You can also try one by one to check which one is best for your WordPress website.