You’ve got a brilliant idea and have turned it into a website with stunning responsive design on a great hosting service. However, that’s not enough. If your website isn’t fast enough you’re going to lose traffic. You can know all about WordPress speed tips, but plugins can make them easier to implement. Let’s check out some of the best plugins to boost the speed of your WordPress website:

WordPress Speed Plugins

1. WP Fastest Cache – With its numerous amazing features, WP Fastest Cache deserves to be one of the most popular WordPress plugins. Page caching loads your website quickly on your user’s traffic and this plugin helps you enable that with a click. Apart from that the free version of the plugin also offers you other features like:

 

• Removing redundant data from your HTML and CSS code

• File compression in the GZIP format

• Allows you to disable emojis

• Helps you integrate with Content Delivery Networks and more

 

For advanced features like database and image optimization, lazy loading, Javascript minification, and more, you can subscribe to the premium version of the plugin.   

 

2. WP Rocket – This powerful plugin is the jack of all trades and does everything flawlessly. If you’re a novice to WordPress speed tips and optimization, you’re in luck. As soon as you install this plugin for your website, it automatically performs some basic optimizations. It enables browser and page caching along with GZIP compression. The user interface is very intuitive with a flat learning curve. When you move the cursor on different options it also shows you a brief explanation of its functionality. 

 

You can learn and implement optimizations as you want. However, there is no free version of this plugin. The upside is that it has all sorts of advanced optimizations like:

 

• Minification

• Lazy Loading

• Combining files

• Cloudflare integration

• CDN integrations and more

 

It’s a one-stop solution that keeps things simple and streamlined. 

 

3. Perfmatters – If you have a favorite page caching plugin for your website and want advanced features to pair with it, have a look at Perfmatters. This plugin lets you optimize small parts of the website that can collectively bring a great impact on the overall speed. You can disable unnecessary clutter like Dashicoins, emoji font, WordPress version number, and more such small settings that pile up your HTTP requests. 

 

You can also manage scripts so that CSS and Javascript load when certain conditions are met. That means you can prevent feedback and contact plugins from loading throughout the website. The plugin also allows you to do other tweaks like host analytics, CDN integration, disable heartbeat API, and more. If you’re subscribed to a caching plugin or pay your host to do it for you, then you can save a lot of money by opting for this plugin instead of a full-fledged speed plugin that has more features than you need. 

 

4. Autoptimize – Another amazing plugin that can take care of numerous optimizations for your website if you have sorted out caching already. Moreover, it doesn’t cost you a dime. Optimizing backend code is one of the pillars of WordPress speed tips. This plugin achieves that by working on your website’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It concatenates multiple files into one so that you get fewer HTTP requests and also does minification to shrink down the code of your website without messing with the functionality. 

 

Apart from that it also helps you optimize other small parts of the website. It can help you to:

 

• Lazy load images

• Async Javascript

• Prevent certain scripts from loading on certain pages

• Remove emojis and much more. 

 

5. ShortPixel – Images account for more than half the files on your website. If you can shrink them down without a drastic deterioration in quality, you can also increase your website’s load speed. ShortPixel is one of the best plugins for that purpose. When you install ShortPixel on your website, you can choose the maximum dimensions for your images and also the algorithm for shrinking the images. You can choose to drastically reduce size with some loss in quality or have lossless compression with the image files shrunk to moderate levels. 

 

Moreover, this plugin lets you convert your images from next-gen formats like WebP to legacy formats like JPG and PNG for browsers that don’t support it. The adaptive images plugin of ShortPixel offers even more versatility. It delivers images to users via a CDN according to their needs. For instance, it delivers a smaller image size to those who are browsing from their smartphone while a larger image size to those who are browsing from a 4K monitor.

WordPress Security plugins

Now that you have optimized the speed of your website let’s check out how you can tighten its security to protect from malicious attacks. These plugins deserve a mention in all articles that talk about advanced WordPress security tips.  

 

1. iThemes Security Pro – A WordPress user can’t live without themes and plugins. Backup Buddy is one such popular plugin you may be familiar with. iThemes Security Pro has the same creators behind it and is a stunning security plugin you may want to install on your website. Like BackupBuddy it has a user-friendly interface that lets you protect your website from brute force security attacks and other such security threats. Among its premier features includes password enforcement, two-factor authentication for an additional layer of security, 404 detections along with plugin scans, and more. 

 

Apart from that this plugin also lets you conduct WordPress backups on a set routine so that you can recover everything in case of an attack. If certain entities are targeting your website for vulnerabilities, this plugin can detect them and block their IPs so that they can’t gain access. You also get notified by email if any malicious files are uploaded to your website. There’s also the option to deter login attempts and scan for malware. 

 

2. Sucuri – Sucuri is undoubtedly one of the best security plugins in the market. It comes in a free version and if you want extra functionalities you can also subscribe to the Pro version for an annual fee. One of its best features is probably malware cleanup. The plugin does it for you if your website gets infected by malware. The setup is also easy and you can access the most important features of the plugin from your WordPress dashboard. 

 

A key tip in advanced WordPress security tips is to track all the changes that happen on your website. Everything from failed login attempts to file changes. This plugin does that for you. The Pro version also gives you advanced DDoS protection which is a necessity in modern times due to the increased frequency of cyberattacks. 

 

3. WPScan – This easy-to-use security plugin has been around for almost a decade and takes care of your website’s security on the backend. It maintains a catalog of various threats and lets you know which ones matter so that you can stay protected. As its name suggests, the plugin scans for security issues in your WordPress site and checks them with its regularly updated database of vulnerabilities. 

 

Since the database is powered by reputed security specialists and a large growing community, almost nothing goes past this plugin. However, its greatest strength is in its pricing. While the premium version of other plugins will put you back hundreds of dollars on the annual plan, this one costs a fraction of that.

 

4. Jetpack – Jetpack is another all-in-one security plugin like Sucuri. With over 5 million active installs it is one of the most popular plugins in its category. The ace feature of this plugin is real-time backups. Every file change and font resizing gets backed up by the plugin in real-time so that you can recover everything if your website’s security is compromised. While advanced WordPress security tips are always welcome, being able to restore everything with a single click should put you at ease. Other features include: 

 

• Activity log

• Decentralized malware scanning

• Protection against brute force attack and malware and more

 

5. All In One WP Security & Firewall – If you have just started your online business with your website and are tight on budget, All In One WP Security & Firewall is the plugin to go for. While it provides basic WordPress security features like IP filtering, login lockdowns, user account monitoring, and website-level firewall, it’s all free. There is no need to spend a single dime when you’re trying things out. The plugin also lets you monitor locked users and unlock them with a few clicks if there’s been a mistake. 

Now that you know about some of the best plugins for WordPress speed and security it’s time to implement them on your website. However, it may be overwhelming to make the right choice given the numerous options and the tier of plans that suits your needs. You can leave all that complicated website management tasks to Design Cavern so that you can use your energy where it’s needed most.

The average human attention span has shortened significantly and the rise of platforms like Tiktok is one such example. While it ranges in a few minutes for videos, it lasts for barely a few seconds when people are browsing the internet. So you have very little time to show them your content and that’s not going to happen with a slow website. You need optimizations and WordPress speed tips to make your website lightning fast so that you don’t lose any potential traffic. Here are a few tips to increase the performance and speed of your WordPress website:

Get the basics right 

Let’s get the basic optimizations and WordPress speed tips out of the way:

 

1. Check your website’s speed – Chrome, Safari, Edge and other modern web browsers caches a website you visit frequently from your PC. which means your website may appear fast to you when you access it from your computer. However, that may not be the case for everyone else. That’s why you should check your website’s speed to know if you require optimizations. Free online tools allow you to check your website’s speed and you should aim to bring it down to the bare minimum at around 2 seconds or less. Even milliseconds have a massive impact on the traffic you attract to your website. 

 

2. Change the host – Unlike people, all WordPress hosting services aren’t created equal. However, they play a big role in your website’s speed. You need a good host so that your website loads fast on any device in most geographical locations. If you’re on shared hosting, you share server resources with numerous customers and that means peak traffic on a neighbor’s website can slow you down. That’s why you should switch to a managed WordPress hosting service that optimizes resources best suited for your needs. Design Cavern is a full service digital agency that can suggest a good hosting service and do other optimizations to boost your website’s speed.  

 

3. Install a Caching Plugin – A caching plugin can make a tremendous difference in your website’s performance. It can make your websites up to five times faster. When a user visits your website for the first time, the caching plugin makes a copy of the page after it loads and shows that to users that follow. That means WordPress doesn’t need to dynamically generate your web pages for every user by going through multiple hurdles that involve PHP files, MySQL database, and conversion to HTML. It’s one of the most underrated WordPress speed tips that you need to implement or leave to professionals at Design Cavern.  

 

4. Image Optimizations – Images are an easy way to engage your users with colorful and captivating content. But they can drag down your website’s speed if not optimized. High-Resolution images captured by DSLRs, action cameras, and iPhones can have massive sizes. You need to compress and convert them to JPEG or PNG format to reduce their size so that they can load quickly on your website. 

Major Optimizations for your website 

Now that you’re done with the basics, let’s check out some major WordPress speed tips optimizations to further increase your website’s performance:

 

1. Background processes need to be optimized – Several background processes run at the back end of your WordPress site to allow for search engines and other crawlers to search through your website, for publishing scheduled posts, for running plugins, and more. You don’t need to worry about background processes that publish schedule posts or check for updates. They consume negligible resources at certain intervals. However, resource-heavy processes like powerful plugin tasks and website crawling can slow down your website if unchecked. Design Cavern will optimize your website to run those processes at the right frequency when you have low traffic so that your website doesn’t slow down when it matters. 

 

2. Update your website regularly – WordPress is an open-source project that gets frequent updates and you need to keep up. You need to update all the plugins, themes, and stay on the latest version of WordPress to keep your website smooth and fast. These updates resolve bugs on the previous version and also fix many backdoors and security concerns. This WordPress speed tip is extremely important since it doesn’t just boost your website’s speed, but also helps you protect your website from security breaches and cyber-attacks. 

 

3. Use a CDN – You may have an excellent hosting service that is located in the US and Europe. That means your users in those locations will see fast load times for your website. However, users in Asia and Australia may not experience the same thing. That’s why you need a CDN(Content Delivery Network) to speed up your website in all locations. A CDN network is spread out throughout the globe so, when a user from another part of the world opens your website, CDN servers closest to the user will deliver those files quickly and increase your website’s speed. It also improves the speed of your hosting service since a significant bulk of the load is shared by the CDN. 

 

4. Use speed-optimized themes – You may come across a gorgeous theme with beautiful graphics and amazing animations. Before you install it on your website, you should check if it affects the speed of your website poorly. Creating gorgeous themes with poor coding is very easy and unfortunately, they flood the market. When choosing a theme try to stick to a modern, minimal, and simple theme that doesn’t shave away your resources with unnecessary features. Stick to reputed theme shops to get themes that are masterfully coded and optimized for fast load times. 

Fine-tune your website

If you’ve implemented the above-mentioned tips, your website should be significantly faster now. However, there are even more optimizations that can be done. These WordPress speed tips will help you to gain milliseconds and together they can add to a significant second of reduced load time.  

 

1. Limit HTTP Requests from external sources – There are numerous themes and plugins that use many files from other websites like Facebook and Google. These include scripts, images, stylesheets, and more. These files are often optimized for loading quickly and there is no issue if HTTP requests from external sources are limited. However, too many requests can shave away at your site’s speed and deliver a poor user experience. The best way to resolve this issue is to merge those files into one. If that’s not possible, consider disabling unnecessary styles and scripts. 

 

2. Consider optimizing your WordPress database – If you’ve been using WordPress for a while you have used a ton of files and information that is sitting in your WordPress database. However, since the updates and optimizations or changes in web design, you may not need those files anymore. It’s best to get rid of that useless information to free up your WordPress database. You can do so manually or use a plugin for those revisions, tags, images, trashed posts, and more. An optimized and clutter-free WordPress database boosts your site speed. 

 

3. Reduce post revisions – Another thing that clogs your database is post revisions. In some cases, they can also affect the performance of your plugins during database queries. When your plugin includes post revisions in the queries it uses more resources than necessary. This can lead to a performance drop for both the plugin and your website. To avoid this, consider reducing the total number of revisions that can be maintained by WordPress for each post. Fortunately, this can be done by adding a single line of code: 

 

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

 

This code limits WordPress to save the last four revisions of each article or page and automatically discards older revisions. By changing the number in the code, you can increase or decrease the number of post revisions you want WordPress to keep.  

 

4. Use a firewall at the DNS level – You already have a firewall plugin to prevent security threats like hacking attempts, brute force attacks, ransomware, and malware. However, if the firewall runs on your website, attackers won’t be blocked even if they reach the web server. While it won’t compromise your security, any downtime on the server isn’t ideal for performance. You should opt for a DNS level firewall that can block malicious activity even before they reach your website. 

 

5. Ask the hosting service to update PHP – WordPress is primarily written in PHP, a versatile programming language. It runs on your hosting server and if it isn’t updated to the latest version it can slow down your speed. Use a PHP version checking plugin to figure out the version of PHP used by your hosting service and ask them to update it if they aren’t on the latest version. 

 

All of these WordPress speed tips are simple to implement. However, they can be time-consuming. Advanced optimizations demand even more research and precious time. A full service digital agency like Design Cavern can optimize your website for you so that you can focus on growing your website.