WordPress is a wonderful platform for building a beautiful website or even a blog but sometimes with all that power comes a trade-off: it can eventually get bogged down! Super slow websites are not fun and it can definitely hurt your SEO as well as annoy your website visitors. Did you know that 90% of people will abandon a website if it fails to load in 3 seconds? This is why keeping your website fast and optimized is important! One of the problems that many WordPress sites encounter is that a lot of themes and plugins are built poorly. They add excessive JavaScript and CSS files that must be downloaded and it really slows your website down. However, there’s a great way to mitigate this using some plugins that really help!
1. WP Fastest Cache
This plugin we actually use here at NodeSpace. You would not believe how slowly our development site crawled before installing WP Fastest Cache. First, this plugin is the simplest of all the other plugins. You simply check which options you want such as pre-loading the cache, when the cache should be updated, minify HTML, minify CSS, minify JavaScript, enable browser caching, and Gzip. That’s all there is to it! The free version doesn’t show you statistics or allow you to optimize images, but from what we found in testing, it’ll definitely help speed up your site! Using the Test My Site tool from Think With Google, we were able to get our scores into the high 80’s regarding website speed on mobile and desktop!
2. W3 Total Cache
This is another plugin that we use on our corporate website, xinsto.com. Our corporate site is very heavy and speeding it up was a challenge which is why we were so happy when we gave W3 Total Cache a go, it made a major improvement. Unlike WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache has a lot of options. This allows you to easily play with all the settings and find out what works best for your site. Likewise, when we got all the settings right, we saw a huge performance increase! It renders like static HTML, since, well, it’s static HTML when it gets served to the client! Speedy!
3. WP Super Cache
If you’re running a WordPress site already and you’ve gone to the Add Plugins page, there’s a great chance you’ve seen WP Super Cache featured. It’s been there for quite some time and for good reason too! This is another plugin which we have used on our corporate website and have seen major performance increases with it meaning it can supercharge your website! This plugin is a little different in the sense that there are 3 ways in which it serves files, from fastest to slowest: Mod_Rewrite – It bypasses PHP and serves static HTML files to the client. It also is preferred because it reduces the load on the server too! PHP – This works as a hybrid mode of Mod_Rewrite and live dynamic file serving as it serves a static cache page, but it also allows dynamic processing on the fly. It’s still comparably fast as Mod_Rewrite, but it does use some resources. Legacy – This is the slowest, but most flexible when it comes to caching. This is used for logged in users, known users, and dynamic pages. The upside to WP Super Cache? It’s built by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.
Know of something else?
Do you know of another awesome way to speed up your WordPress site? Share it with us in the comments below or on Twitter @NodeSpace! We’d love to see what you do and we’ll even possibly feature your tricks in a future blog post!
