One of the first things people with a new WordPress site Google is “How to make my WordPress site faster”. While there are many tricks and ‘hacks’ for this, there are also a few solid, fail-safe techniques to actually speed up your website reliably and permanently. Page load speed greatly affects your search ranking these days, so a site that loads under 3 seconds is a priority for business owners.

According to several studies, any website that takes more than 2 seconds to load has a 47% bounce rate, with some of your visitors never returning to your website again. That could lead to a potential disaster for your brand. When it comes to online buyers, they are some of the least patient visitors you may have. If they have to wait for any purchases, they may abandon their shopping cart.

Here are some ways in which you can actually speed your website with legit WordPress plugins.  According to the 2019 study by Unbounce, 70% of the consumers admit that if the web pages take longer to load, then they are less willing to complete their purchase.  

Doing a Loading Time Test

Before you actually start with the plugins, you need to know how exactly slow or fast your webpages are. You need to keep in mind that there are other factors too that affect your page speeds. Some of them are:

• The overall size of a page
• Requests generated
• Type of requested content – cached or uncached

Always know that the time it takes for your homepage to load, as this is the benchmark for your website.

Google also provides several publishing tools that help to check loading speeds, other checks related to mobile-friendly design standards. Tools like Web.dev Website Performance Measurements, ThinkWithGoogle Test My Site, and Google PageSpeed Insights can help you in the long term, and if you need to review all the different suggestions/issues which Google notifies, you can run all the three tests to be more sure.

Things that Slow Down Your WordPress Website

This comes next as your speed test reports show multiple recommendations for improvement. Here are some of the reasons that can slow your website:

• Improperly configured Web Hosting

When your website isn’t properly configured, it can mess up your website speed badly.

• WordPress Configuration

For any WordPress site, having cached pages is essential to avert overloading your server with too many requests and therefore slowing down your website entirely.

• Page Size

This comes from images on the pages that aren’t optimized for your eStore

• Poor Plugins

There might be some plugins that you may have been using which aren’t properly programmed that may be causing unnecessary delays

• External Factors

There can be advertisements, font loaders, and other addons that may be shown on your website, which can make your website load slower.

Unknown to many business owners, these factors need to be noticed and taken care of to achieve the seamless, and improved experience of your website in the longer term.

Plugins You Need To Speed Your WordPress Website

As you’re taking a look at the WordPress website plugins, here are some things to know about all plugins. While a lot of the plugins share some of the same common features, many have features that may help with some niche tasks. Here are some of the top WordPress plugins that can help your website:

1. WP Rocket

One of the easiest and beginner-friendly caching plugins, the WP Rocket helps you to take care of caching common pages. It’s a free plugin that allows business owners to cache their entire website in a single click. The crawler can automatically fetch the WordPress pages and help build the cache. WP Rocket also automatically turns on the WordPress recommended caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading. It also comes with additional optional features including CDN Support, DNS prefetching, minification, etc.

What Makes it the Best:

• WP Rocket is built to make the caching foolproof for mass speeding up of websites, with little technical experience required. 
• Its user-friendly dashboard helps you create and manage your caching settings for your WordPress websites.
• It comes with video guides to help you learn all the features of the plugin that can be accessed right within your WordPress dashboard.
• The setting options are well-organized and incorporated with relevant support pages and explanations.

2. WP Super Minify

For compressing all the JavaScript and CSS files, this plugin has over 20,000 active installations. It combines and compresses HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files. It comes with a three-step installation process, including plugin download, uploading it to the directory and then activating the plugins menu. 

What Makes it the Best:

Most websites these days use multiple scripts and stylesheets that slow things down. By making these files as small as possible, you can shave off load time. 

3. WP Smush

WP Smush is an award-winning image compression plugin that can help by compressing images without compromising the overall size, integrity or quality of the actual image. This enables your users to have the complete experience of your website while saving on image size and load times. 

What Makes it the Best:

• It can support all common image formats like JPEG, GIF, and PNG
• It removes any unused image colors
• It removes any metadata from JPEG images

4. WP-Optimize

Your database needs to be highly efficient to run your WordPress website at peak times. Every time you edit a post, WordPress creates a revision of the post or page. That way if you edit a page 6 times, 5 revision copies of the same post already exist. The WP-Optimize can help you to clean up by removing all the post revisions and comments. This helps by optimizing and removing all the spam comments, trash, as well as making your MySQL tables smaller.  

What Makes it the Best:

• It helps by decluttering your database from all unnecessary content 
• It helps by organizing your database leading to faster fetch times and enhances the overall response time of your website
• Because of enhanced performance and more space, it gives a major boost to your site speed, and your visitors may find it more responsive
  

Conclusion

The days when WordPress was considered to be a blogging platform are long gone. In recent years, WordPress has transformed into a full featured and super-functional CMS that is considered to be a go-to for nearly any type of website. If you’re a business owner, the loading speed of your WordPress website can either make or break your business. From overall conversion rates to better SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) results, with the right plugins, your website can spread its wings and soar high. 

If you’ve tried some plugins and you’re still not satisfied with your loading times, it might be time to hire professional WordPress developers. Below, we’ve made a list of some great options. 

KrishaWeb
They offer services for popular open-source CMS solutions, including WordPress development. KrishaWeb has many locations in the US and abroad, and they’re a great place to entrust your website.

IntellRocket
A US-based firm, IntellRocket offers design, eCommerce, and WordPress development services. They have a lot of portfolio projects on their website, so you can see for yourself if everything is fast enough!

CodeClouds
A global development company with locations in the US, Australia, New Zealand, and India, CodeClouds has more than 400 experts to help you get your website up to snuff. If you’re looking for professional WordPress development, it doesn’t get much more professional than this.