Website performance for speed is one of the most important metrics when it comes down user experience and search engine optimization. Google introduced Core Web Vitals, a set metrics, to evaluate page performance and overall website user experience. Top 3 metrics in Google's Core Web Vitals are Page Loading Time, Page Responsiveness and Page Visual Experience.
While Page Responsiveness and Page Visual Experience will be discussed later in post, let us focus on website's speed and loading time. But, first thing first, what is your website's performance score? Find out here using a speed testing online tool GTmetrix.
If your wordpress website did not score A grade, this blog post is right for you, keep reading!
Our top 10 picks include tools and wordpress plugins which require low technical knowledge to begin with.
Table of Contents
What Makes a Wordpress Website Speed Slow?
First, there are many online speed test tools for website audit and to get actionable items for wordpress website optimization. These tools such Google PageSpeed provides a speed score to assess current performance standing of your website which can be tracked overtime.
Most website have critical resources to stay untouched but also they contain unoptimized images, unnecessary source code, render-blocking resources and plugins which either conflict with each other or are too big in size to work optimally in the background.
How to Choose Right Performance Optimization Tools?
First, there are many online speed test tools for website audit and to get actionable items for wordpress website optimization. These tools such Google PageSpeed provides a speed score to assess current performance standing of your website which can be tracked overtime.
Many wordpress tools offer all-in-one solution s with an admin dashboard to seamlessly manage optimization tasks. The tools must have following features for a comprehensive solution:
Cache: must offer object caching, cache preloading, optimization of cache files, and automatic ache etc.
Image Optimization: to reduce image size of all the website images without compromising on quality.
Source Code Minification: by reducing the code lines in source code.
Database Cleanup: to remove older drafts and revisions of the posts and spam comments.
There are many advanced features including CDNs, page level script optimization, choosing hosting plans from wordpress optimized hosting services and more. We will dive deeper to look what these plugins offer.
Top 10 Tools for Wordpress Website Optimization
Here is the list of our top picks including free, paid and freemium tools and plugins.
WP Compress
WP Compress comes with most of the features required for performance optimization. They claim All-in-One WordPress Performance that too with one-click button.
Top highlighted features include:
Website Caching: a process of storing dynamic content in a temporary storage to serve future requests faster. This is one of the most common methods to his reduce server load and speed up the delivery.
CSS & JS Optimization: larger css files and source code increase the load time of a web page. These files can be reduced in size by minimizing the code which often results in faster loading times.
Image Optimization: high resolution image size also increase page load time. Best Image compression tool compresses the image file size while keeps the same image quality.
Content Delivery Network: is an advanced feature offered by WP Compress. The CDNs cache the web content in edge locations, near to website users, for speed optimization.
Price: Freemium
Alternatives: WP-Optimize
Perfmatters
Permatters offers all-in-solution to improves website speed by disabling unused scripts in the website and more. As an examples, emojis are load as default wordpress option and if you are not using these, disabling the relevant scrip can improve page speed. It's a premium plugin that comes with affordable price of almost $25 per year.
The key features that makes it a must have, include:
Disable Scripts: with a toggle button that enables or disables scripts for emojis, dashicons, embeds, rss feed, global styles and more. It has such default settings enabled that serve most of the customers.
Script Manager: allows website owners to disable js files on particular pages or posts. Its advanced option allows to group the script by respective plugin to manage. For example, scripts from social media share and contact form 7 plugins can be enabled for certain posts.
Login Security: allows to change login page URL because bots and hackers etc scan the default URL for entry points and vulnerabilities. By simply changing the URL to something obscure helps prevent these attacks.
Google Analytics Local hosting: speeds up page load time by reducing extra DNS lookups and resolves leverage browser caching issue from the script. Additionally, MonsterInsights can also be integrated with locally hosted Google Analytics for more analytics.
Price: $25 per year
Alternative: WP Compress
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one those speed optimization plugins which preloads certain web pages or resources that are stored in the browser caching storage, before a user requests them. This caching functionality ensures faster loading time s when the user navigates to those pages and resources.
Best thing about MainWP Rocket is the price, for $4.49 you can use it on unlimited websites. Following are the features offered:
DNS Prefetching: almost every web request from the browser goes through a DNS server which translates the ip address against a domain name. Using DNS Prefetching, a browser pre-resolves domain names of links on a webpage before the user clicks on them. This ensures faster loading speeds and also consumes less server resources in real-time.
Defer JavaScript Loading: JavaScripts loads dynamic content in a website from a database whenever a user visits the page. Since the process can affect page load speed, deferring javascript loading and other render-blocking resources can result in increased loading speed.
Lazy Loading: web resources and content can also be loaded later when a user demands. Browsers can faster render a web page with lazy load method. The images for example, can be lazy load until a user scrolls down to see it. The page can be pre-filled with a placeholder image to lazy load images later.
Price $4.49
Alternatives: Perfmatters
Advanced Database Cleaner
If your website is up for a while, your WordPress database can become cluttered with spam comments, old post revision s , old auto drafts , and more. While few wordpress hosting providers also offer database optimization but considering a tool for periodic database maintenance can also help reduce performance issues.
One of the prominent features of Advanced Database Cleaner is, it's not only for advanced users but its user friendly interface enables everyone to use it. Its database cleanup key features include:
Optimized Database: it deletes older revisions of posts, blog drafts, pending and spam comments, orphan metadata and relationships, and more.
Scheduled Cleaning: by cron events for automatic cleanings ensures regular database maintenance and optimization to save time and effort. Create as many schedules and select the items to clean.
Selective Cleaning: allows to choose which parts of your database to clean. When this is combined with scheduling, gices more control over the optimization process.
Optimize Tables: by repairing corrupt and damaged tables. It can notify if a table is corrupt or need optimization for the pro-active cleaning.
Price: Freemium
Alternative: WP-Sweep
WP Smush
WP Smush optimize images by resizing, and compression and also converts images to WebP format for faster loading web pages. It's yet another plugin for speed optimization that should be on your list.
Some key features of WP Smush include:
I mage Compression: without compromising their quality. It reduces the file size which helps improve the load time of your website.
Bulk I mage Optimization: allows you to optimize multiple images at once, saving you time and effort. With just a few clicks, you can optimize all the images on your website.
Lazy loading: WP Smush also offers lazy loading for images, which means that images are loaded only when they are visible on the user's screen. This further improves the loading speed of your website.
Price: Freemium
Alternative: ShortPixel
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO specifically is not an optimization tool but an essential seo plugin to optimize website content to improve visibility and organic traffic. Submit your website with Google Search Console before using this tool to track the improvements.
Some key features of Yoast SEO include:
Keyword Optimization: to get keyword suggestion for your website. For higher conversion rates, choosing right keywords with lowest SEO difficulty can really help.
Title and Meta Description: optimization for webpages to make more attractive and informative in SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
Sitemap Generation: to automatically generate the website's sitemap. The sitemap is an xml template to tell search engines which pages to crawl and keeping it updated is essential.
Readability Analysis: of the published content and suggestions to improve the readability. This helps engaging the visitors with the content and helps reducing bounce rates.
Price: Freemium
Alternative: All in One SEO Pack
Asset Cleanup
This tool boosts page load speed by scanning every page for loaded scripts. The interface is friendly for non-technical user s and it provides actionable step s for advanced performance optimization.
Some of its powerful feature s are:
Preload Content: like CSS/JS and local & Google fonts file s to instruct browser that these are available to download as soon. This improves page load speed for browser rendering.
Source Code: optimization to minify js files and static html files which works even better if GZIP compression is enabled.
Plugin Conflict Removal: between plugins and or themes by scanning if two or more plugins load scripts which interfere with each other.
Font Optimization: by asynchronous loading and by combining all font requests into single request to save hosting server round trips. It offers three methods: r ender-blocking, asynchronous loading via Web Font and asynchronous loading via preload.
Price: Freemium
Alternatives: Main WP Rocket
CloudFlare
CloudFlare is one of the leading providers for content delivery and it offers multiple solutions for website optimization, security, improvements and offers CDN to globally serve website content. Their wordpress plugin offers all of the benefits with a one-click installation of settings.
Some powerful feature s are:
Automatic Platform Optimization: by caching complete website including static and dynamic content and stores it on global edge servers. This content hosting service offers cached version s from geo-localized hosting servers. It automatically detects and update cache when you make website changes.
Web Application Firewall: secures website from various online threats and attacks. It provides against vulnerabilities such as DDoS attacks , SQL injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS).
Performance Optimization tool: with automatic cache option automatically caches content and servers it through edge servers. With intelligent routing algorithm, it directs visitors to nearest and faster servers.
Price: $5 per month
Alternatives: AWS Lightsail
MainWP Lighthouse
Once performance optimization plugins and tools optimize your website, it's time to evaluate monitor Google PageSpeed insights. The Google PageSpeed tool reports the user experience on your website and it also provides suggestion to improve it.
With MainWP Lighthouse plugin, you can monitor your website by:
Streamlining Optimization Tasks: using a central dashboard to monitor and get suggestion to improve your website for SEO optimization and speed optimization.
Scheduled Reporting: for daily, weekly and monthly options. This tool provides an option in settings for automatic website audit, enable that and set desired frequency to get the Google PageSpeed insights.
Unlimited Domains: option allows the website owners to use this tool across as many websites as desired.
Price: $4.99
Alternative: Google Search Console
Uptime Robot
Uptime robot monitors your website for any downtime and alerts via multiple channels including SMS, Email, Slack and others.
Some cool features include:
Integrations: options to integrate the plugin with SMS, Email, Voice Call, Email to SMS or Mobile Push etc. This enables immediate action items to restore website during a downtime.
Multiple Monitors: which include status, duration and details to view on the dashboard. There are multiple insights offered for example response time charts.
Customization: for styling, log display, and custom fonts etc to customize the desired user interface and experience.
Price: Freemium
Alternatives: MainWP Advanced Uptime Monitor
Conclusion
Website optimization is a continuous process which requires monitoring, periodic fixing and response to alerts to ensure higher uptime. For improved user experience and conversion rate optimization, using these tools can really be helpful.
To automate the optimization process, you may contact us to apply best practices on your website and improve performance scores.