If your Website loads slow on the visitors’ machine then there are chances to lose their visits, thus increase in traffic loss and decrease in monetary benefits. There are numerous tools available online to analyze & test the Page Loading speed of any Website easily. On the contrary, it is a tough process to optimize the Website Performance as one has to play with server-side files like httpd.conf and .htaccess, which requires thorough technical knowledge and prior experience. Still there are no worries if you are using WordPress as it has a plugin for your each wish. In this write up, we will discuss the plugins to revamp the Page Loading Speed of your WordPress-powered Website.
W3 TotalCache
This is the one stop solution to enable the cache of pages, posts, CSS, JavaScript, Website, Feeds, Categories, Tags, Comments, Search Result Pages, Database Objects, and other Objects either in memory or in disk. You can also minify and compress Pages, Posts, CSS and JS. Just install it and it will automatically guide you to enable Disk Caching, and Browser Caching. In fact, this plugin saves from the entire headache to manually configure the .htaccess files.
HyperCache
This plugin adopts the new mechanism to enable the caching at your WordPress Website. It is also compatible with wp-pda plugin, which makes your site compatible with mobile devices. If you’re hosting your Website on a low-resource plan or server, then use Hyper Cache plugin to increase the Page Loading Speed.
WP-FileCache
If you do not want to go for W3 Total Cache or Hyper Cache, then WP-File Cache is here to help you. Unlike others, it uses default wp_cache API to enable the object level cache for your Website.
WP-Minify
It collects the CSS and JS files in the WordPress Pages and passes their list to its Minify engine. On receiving the list, the Minify Engine provides the compressed, consolidated and minified version in the headers. WP-Minify also help you to detect the duplicate resources and eliminate them for faster operations.
Parallelize
Parallelize allows you to automatic parallelizing the attachment files in your WordPress-based Website across multiple domain names. As per Google Recommendations, you can use this plugin to load the image files either from different sub-domains or domains.
WPHTTPCompression
Both Google Page Speed and Yahoo YSlow! recommends to use the either gzip or deflate compression on the Website to increase the Page Loading Speed. WP HTTP Compression allows your WordPress Website to output the pages in gzip (compressed) format. There will be 60-80% reduction in the Bandwidth Consumption and 3 to 4 time increment in download speed for the Website.
DBCacheReloaded
It caches each database query for lifetime and helps you speeding your Website more than you’ve ever imagined. DB Cache Reloaded is a fork of DBCachePlugin. This plugin use less disk space for caching and gives you complete control over its settings.
WPDatabaseOptimizer
WP Database Optimizer gives you complete control over the database optimization. It allows you to automate and schedule the optimization process for database. You can also optimize the tables from this plugin without visiting the phpMyAdmin or MySQL panel in cPanel.
WPSmush.it
This plugin optimizes the images as per guidelines laid down by Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed. WP Smush.it
- optimize JPEG compression,
- index all the uploaded images
- convert heavy GIF files to indexed PNGs,
- strip un-used colors from the indexed images, and
- strips the meta data from JPEG.
jQueryImageLazyLoadWP
You can delay the loading of heavy images or background images so that other necessary content can load first on the visitors’ machine. There is no need to work upon jQuery for this, as you simply have to install jQuery Image Lazy Load WP to delay the loading of the images.
WPCSS
This plugin use GZIP compression for the CSS files and strip the whitespace in them. This operation will reduce the CSS file size from 30 to 50 percent.
Conclusion
Optimizing the Page Loading Speed and Performance of a Website is a tedious task, but it turns into a breeze when you use above mentioned plug-ins with your WordPress Website. We suggest you to use only one from these plugins: W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache or WP-File Cache. We also invite our readers to add remaining WordPress plugins to optimize performance through their valuable comments.
Pratima Paliwal is a Technical Writer with WordPressintegration.com – a specialized division of CreativeWebLogix. WordPressintegration.com provides PSD to WordPress Conversions within 3 days.
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