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9 Plugins You Must Install to Speed Up Your Web Performance
If “Need for Speed” was a business, then eCommerce ventures will be top of the leaderboard. Well, the demand for speed is actually as a result of consumer behavior. Research shows that web users will not wait for more than 5 seconds for a website to load. If the website does not load within 3-5 seconds, they will simply click on the back button and check out another website. Now you understand the obsession with fast loading websites.
Having a fast loading website for your business can be quite a challenge if you operate an eCommerce venture. First of all, eCommerce websites require pictures to display the products available for sale. Pictures contain data and can cause websites to lag. Balancing speed and sales is crucial as websites cannot do without the use of pictures. To this extent, websites require assistance from certain plugins to help their websites load as fast as possible despite having pictures. Below are 9 plugins you must install to speed up your web performance.
WP Super Cache
This is a very efficient tool for boosting your website. WP Super Cache creates a static HTML file for your website. After generating this HTML file, your web server will serve this file to web users. This makes your website loads faster as this file is far more lighter than PHP scripts. WP Cache also uses features like gzip compression, page cache, cache pre-loading, CDN support and advanced-cache reload to speed up your website.
WP Rocket
This is arguably the most user friendly plugin for speeding up web performance. Installing this is as simple as installing the Woocommerce shop as a customer plugin on your website. Besides its user-friendly nature, this is also a very efficient plugin. Besides caching, WP Rocket also offer many additional features like image lazy loading, database optimization, and even the ability to host Google Analytics code on your own website.
WP Smush
Talk WP Smush, talk about an award winning image optimization plugin. It helps to reduce the size of an image without affecting the quality of that image. Images are important for promoting web content. However, images often come in large sizes and causes your website to lag. With WP Smush, you have the perfect image optimization assistant. It strips images off their meta data and also removes unused colours from indexed images. Unlike most other image optimization plugin, WP Smush keeps the original version of the image it optimizes.
BJ Lazy Load
One major reason why most websites load at a slow pace is because the server is loading all the web content at once. This places some serious load on the server and increases loading time. BJ Lazy Load reduces loading time by offering the lazy loading feature. The lazy loading feature involves loading the content of a webpage in bits. Your server only loads the portion of the webpage that the web user is view. As the web user scrolls through the webpage, the plugin loads that section. Lazy loading is so smooth and seamless that the web user does not even notice.
Autooptimize
Similar to BJ Lazy Load, Autooptimize is another plugin that uses the lazy loading feature. However, its lazy loading feature applies particularly to images. This is very strategic considering that images are one of the major causes of lagging in websites. In other words, Autooptimize loads the content of your website but only loads images in the section where the web user is accessing. As the web user scrolls to other part of the website, this plugin will load them too. Considering that the lazy loading feature applies particularly to images, it will be even smoother and hardly noticeable.
Plugin Organizer
In a bid to improve a website, website admin often install plugins. Plugins like the Woocommerce custom registration helps eCommerce website increase sales. However, having too many plugins can also slow down your website. Furthermore, certain plugins are specific to a few webpage. To solve this problem, you can either manually remove plugins that you do not need or get an efficient assistant to do it for you. Plugin Organizer tells each plugin which webpage they are allowed to load. This plugin also enables you prioritize and sort plugins according to their order of important.
Short Pixel
Short Pixel is an image optimization plugin that automatically resizes images to the dimension that you require. Also, this plugin compresses the sizes of images without changing its quality. It converts PNG files to JPG as well as making WebP conversion available to browsers that supports it. Short Pixel works well with WordPress and will optimize images everytime you upload them for publishing.
WP Optimize
So far, most of the performance improvement plugins have talked about “caching”. However, even cache needs cleaning. That’s why your browser asks you to clean up cache. The same applies to your website and there is need to regularly clean up obsolete content on your website. Sometimes, these content exists on your website without you knowing that they do. WP Optimize helps to clean out your website by removing spam comments and trashed content. It also compresses your images, caches your site and provides database statistics.
Perfmatters
While most performance plugins focus more on caching, Perfmatters takes a different approach. WordPress has a number of default features associated their platforms. Although it may not seem like much, they can actually slow your website down. Perfmatters allows you disable these features entirely or select the page in which you prefer to have them. It may not seem like much, but it can make the difference. Especially in a time like this when people expect a website to load within 3-5 seconds.
All the plugins mentioned above all help to improve the performance of your website. Some of them even do the same duty. While it is important to install performance plugins, it is more important to install the best and only necessary plugins. Do not install two or more plugins that perform the same functions. Also, ensure that the plugin is compatible with your website before installing it.
