In this post, you will learn about How to speed up your WordPress website with free plugins? Whether you are a newbie or a professional, as a WordPress developer you should know already how important site traffic and SEO ranking is. Many factors merge to make a website successful and bring traffic along with good SEO ranking. One of those 100’s of factors google consider for top ranking sites is the Speed Limit. You should make sure to constantly improve your site’s loading time to make your visitor’s experience better and their time and effort worthy because the lesser the loading time is the more visitor will be pleased. Here an important thing is that speed is not concerned with the visitor’s experience ONLY but it’s also important for search engine rankings.
According to the latest research, we come across to some horrible revelations about a website’s slow loading time. Read for yourself:
- A study by Tagman revealed that just a second of delay in page loading of any site can cause 7% loss in conversion.
Imagine how much loss a couple of seconds delay (which we don’t really consider as a delay) can have on your website’s revenue.
- According to derived statistics by Econsultancy tells us that about 47% people expect a web page to load within two seconds. 40% may abandon the page if it took more than 3 seconds to load.
Well with every problem comes a solution and Webful Creations is a platform where you can read blogs related to all such problems in detail. This issue has a pretty simple solution especially for WordPress developers as they have some proper solutions without being too technically savvy.
How to speed up your WordPress website with free plugins?
WordPress offers a complete selection of many different plugins. To improve your website’s loading time. And what makes this, even more, better is that all these plugins are totally free. So, let’s start with the choices that can be made in order to speed up your loading time.
W3 Total Cache:
In between many options for increasing your site’s loading time. One that is often considered most effective is the cache plugin as it is also the most popular one. These plugin developers claim that it increases the site’s performance by 10 times.
What is it? and how it works?
This caching plugin stores images, CSS, javascript files of your website on the server and saves the website to load data from scratch and a static version of your site is displayed every time a visitor is received. You just need to have some prior knowledge of WordPress and its plugins to set it up in less than 5 minutes. Otherwise, a support system is already integrated into the site in the form of CloudFlare and various CDN services such as MaxCDN.
WP Smush.it:
This plugin is basically for image optimization. One can not just go by quality content on their website or blog. To make it relatable and appealing images plays an important role. So visual graphics are equally important for a site. But who will make sure that there are no unnecessary bytes from image files, images are in their perfect format and size and properly compressed?
This issue is already controlled a long time by WP Smush.it as they use Smush.it API within WordPress and also by optimizing JPEG compression. This plugin is also very compatible for a better visual display. As it strips un-used color from images and chooses to run existing images through the plugin.
BJ Lazy Load:
Lazy Loading. Don’t consider us stupid already for putting this ironic name to this plugin because it’s pretty relatable.
We are almost done with the importance of visual graphics and quality content spread over too many pages of a site. Let’s talk about its drawbacks. It’s pretty obvious that the longer the content of your page or the more images you display on your site is the more it took to load or the more time it will take to load (especially images which sometimes take ages to load).
The idea of Lazy Loading is that it will not load the whole site at once. Instead, it will load them gradually or put it simpler it will load the content/pictures when they will become visible in a user’s browser.
It also replaces post and gravatar images along with post thumbnails. This plugin uses jQuery to operate its functions.
WP Super cache:
Its one of the widely used plugin around the globe with about 5.5 million downloads till date. All because of its super easy application. Basically, it is used for generating static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Which the web server serves to the user instead processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
It preloads cache and supports multiple caching types such as Mod_Rewrite, PHP, and Legacy. An advanced version is also available if you want to make the most out of this plugin.
Digg Digg:
Calm down because it’s definitely as ridiculous as it sounds. On the contrary, it’s quite useful because it is related to social media.
Social media presence is one of the most important things nowadays. But what effect they have on your website is pretty daunting.
HOW?
Social media plugins are by far the slowest loading peeps. If you have around four social media buttons on your homepage. You are asking HTTP query to work four times extra queries. Which are the most effective element in slow loading time.
Digg Digg with the help of lazy loading put all these four social media buttons in a placeholder. Which do not require any extra query for HTTP. This way your browser will load these social media buttons only when the user will click on it.
This is it. Your ultimate solution for How to speed up your WordPress website with free plugins. Now you can easily speed up your WordPress game. Experience it for yourself and don’t forget to share your views and queries in the comments below.