Top 6 Best Plugins to speed up wordpress site
As you progress through a great informative and elegant wordpress site, you will also have to tackle many problems as the site grows with popularity and traffic. The biggest challenge is not loose a single reader because of a non responding web page.
You will have to focus on page load time from month one of starting your wordpress blog. Refer to tools.pingdom.com to understand your site’s page loading time.
To start with you select a good shared hosting plan and install these plugins. Web hosting plays an important role to make blog or website load faster. Hence it becomes utomost important that you chose the best web hosting. You can buy web hosting plan on Black Friday when website companies announce Black Friday Web hosting deals and discounts.
In the next stage when your average monthly page views cross 50K then you select a managed wordpress hosting like WP engine or Siteground Otherwise you have to manage your wordpress with a list of activities.
Here I am listing top 6 WordPresss plugins which are must have for any blogger to reduce page load errors.
1. W3 Total Cache (Improve server performance)
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your self hosted wordpress site by increasing server performance. In the settings you can add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress. You can choose from a CDN provider but it also has the option of Self hosted/FTP Upload.
2. Wp smush it – (Optimize image)
This Plugin reduces the image file size without loosing the quality.It stripes meta data from JPEGs, optimizes JPEG compression,converts GIFs to indexed PNGs,removes the un-used colors from indexed images thus making it SEO friendly.Pretty awesome plugin if you have a website full of images.
3. Wp optimize (Optimize database)
This Plugin enables you to cleanup & optimize database. Great for those who does not have the idea to do it in PhpMyAdmin and even if you do have the knowledge just look at the options it provide.
- Clean all post revisions.
- Clean all auto draft posts and posts in trash.
- Remove spam comments and comments in trash.
- Remove unapproved comments.
- Remove transient options.
- Remove pingbacks.
- Remove trackbacks.
4. Free CDN (CLOUDFLARE)
If your site powered by a Content Delivery Network, page loads faster and it becomes search engine friendly.There are many plugins like CoralCDN, Jetpack etc. but my take is on Cloudflare. It has the highest number of data centers giving your site a real big boost.
5. P3 profiler (Check other plugins)
For sites where number of plugins are used , it is often found to be slow because of all the plugins are not perfectly configured. This plugin helps you identify other plugins which slow down your site’s page load time.You may then find other suitable alternatives to crack your need and also maintain page speed.
Download p3 profiler
6. Broken link checker (WordPress link checker)
Broken links hurts site SEO but it also slows down the page load. If you get a (404 not found) for an image this also means your site making an unproductive HTTP request. This also means your page will spend more time and resource to find it, resulting in a slow page load. This plugin enables you find and manage those broken links in your wordpress site.
Bottom LIne
There are severa factors that need to be taken into account when it comes to increasing page load speed. Buy good web hosting from Black Friday Web hosting deals as web hosting plays an important role. Secondly, install the plugins we have discussed above.
