10 best free WordPress plugins to make site faster.
If you don't want visitors to leave your website, you should make sure that your website is very fast and loads quickly. According to some studies 83% visitors expect a web page to load in 3 seconds or less and more than 40% visitors abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow website means loss of traffic, page views, and revenue. 79% shoppers who have trouble with website speed say they won't return to the website to buy again.
How to analyze site speed?
GTmetrix is a very popular free service, which you can use to analyze speed of any website. You can take a screenshot of the report or download report as a PDF file.
Google PageSpeed Insights is another free service. Remember, site speed is one of the most important factor that Google uses to determine search engine rankings, both on desktop and on mobile.
Aproximately 29% users who browse sites on smartphones switch to another site or app if they can't find the info they looking for or the site is too slow. You can use Google PageSpeed Insights service to analyze your website speed and see the suggestion summary.
How to decrease page load time?
Once you have generated reports, It's time to optimize your website for speed. There are many ways to decrease page load time and make your website fast. I am going to list some of the most popular free WordPress plugins to make site faster. You can install any a the following WordPress plugins to improve speed in other words to optimize your website for speed.
Avoid Shared Hosting
Choose a good hosting provider and avoid shared hosting plan. If possible, start with Managed WordPress hosting. If you are going to start a website/blog for business, don't hesitate to pay for managed hosting. With Managed WordPress Hosting plans, it will be easy for you to create and manage multiple websites for clients.
Pagely is the Managed WordPress Hosting Service in the Amazon cloud. With their Basic plan, you can host up to 5 WordPress sites with fully managed updates and security.
Siteground is another popular hosting provider and you can start with basic plan to host your first website.
Free Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress
Don't forget to optimize your images to reduce the size. It makes sense to optimize and resize images to ensure quick loading time. We don't need to tell you that high-resolution images are heavy, absorb more bandwidth and take too much time to load.
There are many free online services available to reduce images sizes without losing quality of images. tinypng lets you optimize multiple images.
How to speed up WordPress site - htaccess optimization, part 1.
How to speed up WordPress site - images optimization, part 2.
With this free plugin, You can optimize your JPEG and PNG images automatically. You can also use this plugin on WordPress multi-site network.
After you upload an image to your site, each resized image is uploaded to the TinyJPG or TinyPNG service for optimization and then the compressed image is sent back to your site. Optimized images replace the original large images.
2. WP Smush
With 500,000+ active installs, this is one if the most popular image optimization plugin. You can also set a maximum width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed.
This free plugin can optimize JPEG, GIF and PNG image files. You can manually compress your images individually in the media library, or in bulk 50 attachments at a time.
Free Caching Plugins for WordPress
There are many free caching plugins available to serve static pages for faster page loads.
W3 Total Cache is an advanced caching plugin to improve the user experience of your site. This free plugin can easily increase website speed via features like, compression, minification and content delivery network (CDN) integration.
It also saves your bandwidth via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.
A free and very popular plugin to generate static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. When HTML pages are generated, your web server will serve those static files.
Minify CSS and JavaScript on WordPress site
You can use these two free plugins to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Minification process removes all unnecessary characters from the source code without changing its functionality.
A very light weight and free plugin to combine, minify and caches HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files.
Another free plugin to group JavaScript and CSS files to increase page speed. This plugin also allow you to add CSS & JS via WordPress admin panel.
Lazy Loading Plugins
Lazy loading is a concept where we delay the loading of the images, videos etc until the point where we need it.
Lazy Load is a good concept to delay loading of images in long web pages. In simple words images outside of viewport are not loaded until user scrolls to them.
7. BJ Lazy Load
This plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes with a placeholder. It also works with images, YouTube, Vimeo videos and text widgets.
8. a3 Lazy Load
a3 Lazy Load is the most fully featured lazy load plugin for WordPress. This free plugin allow you to define what elements (images, videos) are lazy loaded when they become visible in the user browser.
a3 Lazy Load supports all WordPress video Embeds including Youtube, Vimeo and HTML5 videos. You can also enable or disable lazy loading for videos or images on Posts, Pages and Widgets.
Content Delivery Networks
You can also use Content Delivery Networks to improve page loading time. A Content Delivery Network can drastically reduce page loading time by storing static files on a network of fast loading servers.
MAX CDN, CloudFlare, Incapsula, Photon and CoralCDN are few free CDN services.
You can install this free Plugin to enable all of Cloudflare's performance and security benefits in a simple one-click install of recommended settings.
10. JetPack Photon
A free image CDN and editing service for WordPress blogs and websites. If you are using Shared Hosting provider, A CDN can serve faster images to your readers.
Final Tip - Choose WordPress Themes and Plugins Wisely
You don't need to install dozens of plugins on your site. Uninstall extra plugin. JetPack has a lot of modules. With JetPack, You can enable social sharing, Spam protection, security, site verification, backups and many other modules.
Uninstall extra themes and make sure, Your theme is optimized for SEO and speed. Sometimes a bloated theme can be a problem. Always Buy premium WordPress Themes from professional and experienced WordPress developers.
That's all for this article, It's time to optimize your website for speed.