When it comes to WordPress there are a number of great caching plugins that will help you boost the speed of your website. To help you narrow down your search we have come up with 7 best WordPress speed optimization plugins. Here is our list:
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the #1 rated cache plugin for WordPress. A premium plugin that truly worth it. Easy to use and frequently updated, WP Rocket is a must-have plugin for every WordPress website that is serious about loading speed and user experience.
WP Rocket offers a single click option to implement caching. The crawler in the plugin picks up your pages to build up the cache. Caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and pre-loading are automatically turned on. This plugin also has extended optional features like lazy loading, CDN, DNS fetching, modification, etc.
Important features of WP Rocket includes:
- Easy and simple set up for beginners
- Cache Preloading feature
- Database optimization
- HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files compression
- Lazy load images
- And extended optional features.
- Minification
- Combine files
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
- Heartbeat API control
- CDN integrations
- Option to host tracking scripts locally
- Cloudflare integration
Any other plugins can rarely beat WP rocket when it comes to performance and ease of use.
WP Rocket offers three pricing plan with 14 days money back guarantee.
WP Fastest Cache
WP fastest cache is a free cache plugin for speed optimization and has the highest rating among all other cache plugins. This plugin does not include a feature for lazy load, and database cleanup.
With more than 1 million active installs, WP fastest cache is a must-use free plugin that will speed up your WordPress site in a few clicks. The caching setting can be all controlled as per your requirement.
WP Fastest Cache comes with a free and a premium version. The free version is limited to certain features but you will get all the basic features like minification and caching things.
- Gzip compression
- Browser caching
- Basic minification for HTML and CSS (but not JavaScript)
- Option to disable WordPress emojis
- Exclude rules to exclude certain users/content from caching
- A tool to help you integrate with CDNs
The premium option allows you to enjoy the maximum features of the plugin and offers extra optimization scope.
- Image optimization
- Database optimization
- More advanced minification, including support for JavaScript minification
- A tool to eliminate render-blocking JavaScript resources
- Option to load Google Fonts async
- Lazy loading
The WP fastest cache pricing model looks like:
- Bronze $49 – 1 site license
- Silver $125 – 3 site license
- Gold $175 – 5 site license
- And More
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize plugin comes really handy when it comes to cleaning trash, spam, post revisions, and junk files that are stored in the database. Such unwanted resources can slow down your site and admin panel. WP Optimize performs schedule cleanup and maintains a clean databased.
Important features of WP Optimize includes:
- Remove post revisions
- Cleans up the post trash
- cleans spam comments
- removes pingback and trackbacks
- compress images and performs caching
The free version of WP OPtmize is great but the premium version of the plugin offers even more powerful options for optimizing the speed of your website.
The extended premium features include:
- Multi-site assistance
- flexibility
- Schedule database cleanups
- Remove orphaned (unused) images
- Lazy load images
- Optimize individual database tables
WP Smush
WP Smush is one of the best WordPress plugins for making the site load faster. This plugin performs image compression to reduce the size of images. Heavy images take time to load completely and slow down the loading time.
With this plugin, you can auto compress and optimize all the images in your site and make your site load faster. WP Smush is a plugin by WPMUDEV, an excellent team for WordPress optimization.
Using this plugin you can reduce the image file sizes without reducing the size and affecting the quality of the image.
WP Super Cache
WP super cache is one of the most used caching plugins for WordPress. A free plugin recommended by top WordPress experts. This plugin comes with all the essential features to speed up your website. It includes features like:
- Gzip compression
- page cache
- CDN support
- cache preload
- Browser caching
- How to cache content
- How often to update the cache
The plugin dashboard has a separate tab for easy setup and includes many advanced options.
The cache preload is a good feature in this plugin that will cache all the published posts and pages on the website and serves the cached static page to the visitors.
Jetpack
Jetpack is a super powerful plugin by wordpress.com. Developed by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), Jetpack comes with some great features.
Jetpack strongly focuses on security and has a lot of features to make your WordPress website more secure. Apart from the security it also works great with optimizing the performance of the website.
Some of the important features of Jetpack includes:
- Plugin auto-update
- antispam
- enhanced search
- enhanced performance
- lazy loading and video hosting
- site stats
- blogging enhancement
Autoptmize
Optimizing site with Autoptimize is really easy. It helps to minify and cache scripts and styles. Using this plugin you can move and defer the script to the footer and minify HTML. You also have the lazy load option to better optimize images.
Some of the advanced features of Autoptimize includes:
- concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them
- adds expires headers
- moves styles to the page head, and scripts (optionally) to the footer
- minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight.
You may want to read: Rank Math Vs Yoast SEO
Frequently Asked Questions
❓ Which is the Best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins?
✔ Each of the plugins works differently. So, recommending a single plugin is might not be helpful for everyone. It is helpful to choose different plugins and test the performance and figure out which works the best for your website.
❓ Do I need a premium plugin?
✔ Nor really, we encourage you to use the premium plugin only when you really need it. Most of the free plugins work great. You should consider using a premium plugin only when you actually require some extra features and extended optimization.
❓ How many plugins Should I use?
✔ This totally depends on what you are trying to achieve with the plugins. Sometime a single plugin meets your requirement, while in other cases, you might have to consider using few plugins together to achieve the desired functionality. It is always recommended to use minimum plugins. Some poorly coded and out dated plugins can lead to security breach, slow down loading speed and downgrade the performance of website.