Ensuring a site is fast is a bit of a moot point for most SEO experts now. Google provides its PageSpeed Insights program completely free to help marketers understand where their websites are sluggish and improve them as much as possible. In many cases it can be difficult to really improve a site’s speed if the underlying issue is with site’s theme (for WordPress) or various plugins. However, there are a few techniques to use and one that I personally prefer is leveraging caching plugins.
Here are 3 plugins I highly recommend for WordPress users:
Autoptimize
This handy all-in-one plugin allows users to make sites extra fast in just a few steps. The UI of the plugin is really simple and built for any level of user in WordPress. Begin in the plugin by minifying all CSS, HTML and JavaScript files. Every bit of white space takes up an extra millisecond of time for browsers to process, so it’s always recommended to clean up these files. And as a bonus of this plugin, you’ll find it as lazy-loading capabilities. Lazy-loading images allows the browser to display images as the user scrolls over them rather than spend time to pre-load all of the images.
As always, make sure you test!
WP Super Cache
A tried and true plugin, WP Super Cache is made to make sites as fast as possible. Again, the speed will ultimately depend on themes and plugins installed, but this plugin provides a variety of options to get things moving. Be sure to utilize the minifying options and leverage browser cache to store versions of the site on the user’s side.
Be sure to test the plugin on a fresh browser or use an incognito mode.
Breeze
One of my new favorites from the cloud-based hosting provider Cloudways comes Breeze. Much like Autoptimize and WP Super Cache, Breeze give its users a really easy-to-understand interface with options for minifying files, deferring certain scripts, combing JS and CSS files, and more. The only drawback to Breeze is you have to be a Cloudways customer for any support.
And as always, be sure to test! Try a setting, save and view in a clean browser to make sure it works.
Other Options
A caching plugin is just one piece of the pagespeed puzzle. With anything you try, I recommend testing it agains Google’s Pagespeed Insights and GTMetrix. These speed tools provide a full list of optimizations you can implement for both desktop and mobile versions of your site.
