Within the spectrum of content management systems (CMS) available to designers, marketers, bloggers and others, WordPress is one of the most versatile. WordPress has become the pillar on which a good part of the web pages we visit each day are based. Some of the biggest brands on earth use the popular CMS.
It is a CMS that can be used to develop anything from a corporate website to an online medium, a blog or even a corporate intranet. Thanks to WordPress website plugins, simple widgets, WordPress Facebook widgets, social media plugins and templates, we can configure a website tailored to our needs without a high learning curve.
We like to talk a lot about WordPress and its possibilities. It is a great platform for anyone looking to launch their own project on the Internet and have a flexible, versatile, open and constantly evolving platform.
Many times, when we launch a project on the Internet, we tend to pay close attention to functionalities, design or content. Those are all very important, however, there is another key pillar that we sometimes ignore despite its importance: performance.
Performance of your WordPress site
The performance and operation of a website are key aspects that we should not neglect. However good the content of the website may be, if the page takes too long to load, it is possible that we lose our users and they tend to move on to sites that perform better.
A good website must have a good response time, must load quickly and present optimized images that do not harm the visualization or loading aspects. As a matter of fact, hosting also plays a vital role in optimization of your site.
It is recommended that you acquire the services of only the best hosting providers in the market with a good reputation. We recommend The WP Help for one option.
Does my website need any optimization?
If you have questions about whether your website needs some optimization, a good way to find out is to go to Google PageSpeed Insights and evaluate our website there to see if Google has any recommenations and to check what score it gives your site with respect to response times offered.
Using a CDN can be a good option with which to “lighten” the load of our web server and contribute to performance improvement, optimize the database we use can also be another task to undertake. Using external services such as Dropbox for Images will also help a lot to load and even implement a cache that has “preloaded” pages to serve.
Primarily, plugins are the most powerful resources out there to optimize your site. There is a plugin for anything you wish to do with your website. In fact, there are more than 54,000 plugins available in the WordPress plugin directory. With that being said, the following are some performance-related plugins that you can definitely use to optimize your website!
Lazy Load for Videos
Lazy Load for Videos is an interesting addition in WordPress blog plugin for website that will allow us to lighten our website if we offer pages that have videos incorporated. Thanks to this WordPress plugin, the video that we have inserted will be replaced by a photograph that acts as a preview and, only, if the user decides to click on the video, then the video container will be loaded on the page.
In other words, with this add-on, the code of a YouTube or Vimeo video will be replaced by an image that will contain a “video playback” icon. In this way, the page will load much earlier, and only the video container will be loaded for users who actually click to view the content.
WordPress Lazy Load
WordPress Lazy Load is a plugin that follows the same path as Lazy Load for Videos since its objective is none other than to accelerate the loading of pages, thanks to the optimization of multimedia content viewing. In this case, WordPress Lazy Load puts the focus on the images with the intention of not loading the photographs that we have not yet reached when we are visiting a web page.
Specifically, WordPress Lazy Load plays with the scroll and only loads the images as we proceed in the reading. The loading of the images is sequential, and as we move forward in reading the contents (minimizing the waiting time).
Prizm Image
Prizm Image is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for website that also focuses on the images that we attach to our articles in WordPress. Its purpose is to optimize the loading of our site by adapting the size of the images to make the loading time shorter. Prizm Image applies compression techniques to photographs in JPG format and also compresses images in PNG and GIF format to make them somewhat lighter.
In order to use this plugin, we will have to register on the website of the service, but the use is free, so there is no major inconvenience in using this add-on.
Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/blogging-typing-wordpress-macbook-2620148/
WP Performance Pack
WP Performance Pack is an interesting plugin using which we can improve the performance of our WordPress installation through a simple control/optimization panel. It is specially oriented to websites where translations are being used.
We can apply a cache for translations, deactivate them or activate them, only, to specific users. We can also visualize performance graphs and evaluate the response of our WordPress against “clean installations”, installations without translation or installations that have the cache activated.
Performance Monitoring, Analytics
Performance Monitoring, Analytics by FuelDeck is an interesting plugin that allows us to integrate, within our website, the features offered by the FuelDeck service. To be able to use this add-on, we will obviously need an account in FuelDeck (there is a free modality) and, from there, we can measure key aspects of the operation of our website: loading time, monitor performance, pages served or, even, get an idea of how our website works in different internet browsers.
Google Pagespeed Insights for WordPress
We spoke at the beginning of Google Pagespeed Insights as a basic tool to measure the performance of our website. It is a plugin that we can also integrate into WordPress, thanks to the Google Pagespeed Insights for WordPress plugin. With this plugin, we will take our useful Google tool to our website, and we will be able to measure, in all comfort, the loading time of our website, detect errors or aspects to optimize and obtain the assessment that Google gives to our website.
Being able to analyze our website from the WordPress dashboard is very comfortable and, without a doubt, will help us a lot to improve our website and make it more enjoyable for our readers.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize is a plugin aimed at “reorganizing” the code of our website and linking the HTML, CSS and JavaScript under a “same package” that allows to save bandwidth, organize the loading of our page and, above all, goes faster. The result we think we can imagine, a page that loads faster without having to perform an inspection of the code of our website, the optimization is done directly by this plugin.
AIO Cache & Performance
AIO Cache & Performance is a complete plugin with the provision of a cache to our WordPress installation. It remains a complete tool that aims to accelerate the loading of the pages we serve, thanks to a memory that stores preloaded pages instead of building them on the fly when we receive a request.
In addition, to improve the performance of our website, AIO Cache & Performance also performs code optimization and will move the provision of CSS and JavaScripts to lighten the web load.
Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/laptop-notebook-account-141937/
PHP/MySQL CPU Performance Statistics
PHP/MySQL CPU Performance Statistics is one of the most powerful plugins for WordPress website designed to evaluate the performance of our web server and, in this way, visualize if we need to perform any improvement task related to the configuration of the server or MySQL database that supports our WordPress.
The plugin performs a series of tests that evaluate the response of our database to basic operations (reading records, deleting records), and also how the CPU of our server responds. Interesting information that will help us to check if the hosting we have is acceptable or we should look for other accommodation for our website.
Performance Optimization: Order Styles and JavaScript
Performance Optimization: Order Styles and Javascript is another plugin aimed at improving the code of our WordPress and reorganizing both HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to accelerate the loading of pages and, therefore, to offer better performance to the user.
Elementor Page Builder Plugin
Elementor is the leading drag and drop page builder plugin that helps you to create the custom website without any coding skills. You can grab the deal by using this Elementor Pro discount code. Beyond the drag and drop functionality, this builder also offers lots of great marketing tools, including visually appealing forms to improve your conversions.
Conclusion
Understood the importance of performance related plugins for your website? It is important to be smart about how far you should go in strategizing and planning out your website. At this point, it should be the utmost priority to not neglect the performance of your website for anything.
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It was interesting information for me.Keep going i follow you
Thanks so much for reading. Much appreciated!
Good day! Do you know if they make any plugins to protect against hackers? I’m kinda paranoid about losing everything I’ve worked hard on. Any tips?
There are a ton of great plugins for security. Here’s a good place to start. https://wpforms.com/best-wordpress-security-plugins/
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Thanks for finally talking about these WordPress plugins. I was searching for exactly this info. Loved it!