If you have chosen WordPress as your blogging platform, then it’s a perfect choice but as you continue on writing posts on WordPress you may notice that the speed and load time of your blog gradually goes on decreasing. You are not the only one person facing the problem with website speed. I am also one of the blogger whose GTMetrix Speed was below 60. As you know that the speed of your blog  hampers your SEO and visitors experience so in order to improve your site SEO and to decrease your bounce rate I am going to provide the list of  7 plugins and tools to speed up wordpress performance and speed.

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• You can use GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights to test the speed of your website.

Starting a blog is a simple job, you can start it just by signing up for a Blogspot account or just by hosting WordPress on your shared hosting server, but maintaining and giving consistency to your blog is one of the major problem that every blogger face each day. Everyday, bloggers like you and me are using various techniques to improve site SEO, reduce bounce rate and to get more followers, but I noticed that without knowing the consequences most of the bloggers are not focusing on their website speed. Guys your speed matters a lot to remain in this highly competitive blogosphere. Therefore, you must use these tools to speed up your wordpress site.

7 Plugins and Tools to speed up WordPress Performance and Speed

At initial days of blogging I was not focusing on my blog speed as a result, I faced several issues like my bounce rate was increased by 50 percent and my search engine ranking was shifted from first page to the third page. Therefore when you start a blog never think that it’s a new blog and optimization are not needed instead you should optimize its speed from the first day of blogging.

So, guys without wasting the time let’s get started with the list of 7 plugins and tools to speed up WordPress speed and performance

1. Use caching Plugin

When a user types your blog URL in his address bar the whole PHP script and other dynamic contents are sent to the user’s browser, then the browser compiles the codes to serve the pages to the user, but when you use a caching plugin it reduces the server load time by serving the static pages rather than dynamic contents. This makes the site faster by serving the cached static HTML files which reduces the time of compiling the PHP and other scripts.

W3 Total Cache Plugin

If your are not aware about W3 Total cache plugin then here in this section I will give you a quick intro of this plugin. 

W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress caching plugin that automatically caches the dynamic PHP scripts into a static HTML format. When you install this plugin in your blog, it will then create a cached static HTML pages in a separate folder by minifying JavaScript and CSS files.

W3 Total cache have various different options to speed up wordpress blog and you can give it a try by downloading and installing it for free.

2. Use CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Content Delivery Networks are the large collection of distributed servers deployed in multiple countries or in multiple data centers across the internet. When a browser makes a request for a specific website, the first step is to make a DNS request. When a browser makes a DNS request for the specific domain name rather than sending the request to the web hosting server the CDN handles the request and serves the cached web pages that is stored in their server from the nearest location.

How CDN makes website Loading Faster

To be more clear about How CDN works and How it makes the website loading faster I will give you an example with a real scenario.

Currently, ITDigitalWorld is hosted on a server located in the United States and most of my visitors are from India, Pakistan and from USA. Therefore, my blog will load faster if the visitors are from United states because server is located near to them, but the speed will significantly goes on decreasing if distance between the web server and the visitor increases. So, it will load slower if the visitor are from India or Pakistan.

In order to overcome this problem you must use a Content Delivery Network and therefore I am using cloudflare CDN because it has the large collection of 30 distributed servers in different counties and locations around the world. Now, whenever the visitors from India or Pakistan makes a request instead of forwarding the request to the web server cloudflare handles the request by serving the website hosted in its nearest data center i.e from Singapore data center.

3.  Use Quality Themes

The theme of your WordPress blog is one major factor that affects the speed of your website. While designing a blog keep in mind that your blog should have easy navigation with faster speed. I mean the theme that you use in your WordPress blog must be simple and light with no any large files such as heavy flash files, images or videos to be loaded. The code of you theme must minify the JavaScript, should avoid bad requests, should use external css instead of inline css and should avoid landing page redirects.  After verifying these qualities and selecting the perfect WordPress theme I am sure that it will obviously speed up wordpress performance.

All fancy and stylish premium wordpress theme are not fully optimized to speed up wordpress performance therefore before purchasing any theme from any provider check its speed using  Google PageSpeed Insights or by using GTmetrix.

I have been using Nominal theme a fastest wordpress theme provided by MyThemeshop and you can give it a try by getting 50 percent discount by using the coupon code “ITDigital50”

4. Avoid using unnecessary Plugins

WordPress plugins are the basic need that is required by every blogger or developer to tailor the website according to their need but in many cases the webmaster blindly installs wordpress plugin without thinking twice. Most of the bloggers and webmaster do not know that usage of excessive wordpress plugins is the major cause to slow down the wordpress performance and in order to speed up wordpress clean those unnecessary plugins right now.

Using too many wordpress plugins means giving load to the server by compelling to accept too many database query request at once and sometime these plugins may also conflicts with other that may also increase the server load which finally decreases the speed of your website.

5. Delete spam comments

As you know that wordpress is developed using PHP and MySQL and therefore for each function a database table is assigned to them. Storing or getting too many spam comments means that it is consuming unnecessary space in database table and whenever any visitor visits your website the web server will also accept the unnecessary database query request for those spam comments therefore, you need to delete those spam comments to avoid those queries.

6. Use Image Compression Plugin

High resolution image with large file size will obviously slow down the performance of your website and if you are using wordpress then you are lucky because you can find different plugins that can optimize the speed of your website by compressing those large images without losing quality into small sizes.

WP Sumsh.it Plugin

WP Smush.it lets you to compress JPEG, GIF and PNG images into small sizes without losing its quality. The free version of WP Smush.it lets you to compress the images upto 1MB in size while pro version can compress images up to 5 MB in size using its dedicated smushing servers.

7. Avoid using too many ads

Third party advertisements are never stored in your web server instead it is stored in the server of advertising network therefore every time the visitor reloads or opens the new page of your website the ads are again loaded from the beginning whereas other content are stored as cached in the visitors computer.

As you know that JavaScripts codes are used in those third-party advertisements, unnecessary and too many usage of such ads can increase the server load time as well as it can slow down the performance of your website therefore you must avoid using excessive ad codes.

Conclusion

Guys, these are the list of  plugins and tools that can help you to speed up wordpress performance and speed therefore if you find this article useful then please share it with your friends and do comment below to provide any other tools or plugins to increase the speed of the wordpress site.