No one likes a slow website. Not only is it frustrating, but most people will click “back” from a site if the load time is more than a couple of seconds. Don’t let your visitors give up on you before they’ve even had a chance to check out your content. These 10 plugins will help you optimize your WordPress site for better website performance (Note: having these plugins is great, but if you have too many, they’re doing the exact opposite of what you want.)
Async Social Sharing
In order to promote social sharing it’s important to have the share widgets for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other websites directly on your page. Be careful though, because they can slow you down. This plugin fixes that by having those widgets load by themselves after the initial page load so they don’t bog down your speeds.
Downloads: 3,000+
Check out Async Social Sharing
BJ Lazy Load
Sometimes you don’t need all of the content on your page to load at the same time. This plugin keeps all images, thumbnails, and embedded videos at bay until they’re about to enter the browser window. This will help free up bandwidth as everything won’t be trying to load at once.
Downloads: 30,000+
Check out BJ Lazy Load
Autoptimize
Want to easily optimize your site? This plugin will automatically concentrate all scripts and styles, as well as minimize the HTML code to make your page as light as possible. The less data that needs to be transmitted the quicker everything else will follow.
Downloads: 100,000+
Check out Autoptimize
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
What happens if you have too many plugins in an attempt to optimize your website? That’s what this plugin is all about. It will analyze the impact of all of your installed plugins on the performance of the site, and let you know what plugins might be poorly configured or slowing you down.
Downloads: 100,000+
Check out P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
WP Smush
Great written content is made even better when combined with some clear images. Unfortunately, uploading a variety of high definition images can slow your page to a crawl. WP Smush will get rid of the hidden data behind your images, reducing the file size without sacrificing quality.
Downloads: 300,000
Check out WP Smush
WP Optimize
Your WordPress page database contains a lot of information that can drag down the speed of your site. This optimization tool will help clean up extraneous content like metadata, spam, superfluous drafts, and trash. You can schedule this plugin to optimize your site on a weekly basis.
Downloads: 400,000+
Check out WP Optimize
Jetpack
If you’re looking to speed up your site, Jetpack is the plugin for you. Like its name implies it will optimize image load speeds and help streamline your website. Jetpack will also push everything to a centralized widget, giving you easy control over all of your options.
Downloads: 1 million+
Check out Jetpack
W3 Total Cache
Used by many popular companies, this plugin can give you blazing fast speeds by increasing server performance and providing transparent CDN integration. It promises at least a 10X improvement in website performance, upping site responsiveness and helping you get more visitors.
Downloads: 1 million+
Check out W3 Total Cache
WP Super Cache
Fetching uncached data can take a lot of time and effort. This plugin solves that by generating static HTML files from your WordPress page. When someone visits the site, those files will be delivered to the user. About 99% of your visitors will get static data from this plugin, freeing up load speeds to improve your performance.
Downloads: 1 million+
Check out WP Super Cache
Though we’ve chosen 9 to highlight here, there are many more out there. Do you already use these? What are some other plugins that you’ve found to be helpful? Let us know in the comments!
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