Speed Plug-ins: Why We Need Them

Site speed is a crucial factor for any website. Many of us have been directed to a website through Site Comments and found that it is so slow loading that we have quickly lost interest and left. We have all done that to websites outside the WA community. Another factor to think about it that site speed is one of the 200 factors Google considers when ranking a site. So it is vital that we focus on this issue.

A survey by KISSMetrics showed that 47% of website users expect a site to load in 2 seconds. So we need to be constantly focussed on this matter. Too many plug-ins may be contributing to the snail's pace of our beloved blog site, but we may just need one or two optimisation tools to speed things up close to blistering!

Speed-Up Plug-Ins

Here are three of the most popular speed optimisation plug-ins for our website. Many reviews that I researched consistently mention these plug-ins as top of the heap.

• W3 Total Cache

What does a caching plug-in do? A caching plugin is designed to store the CSS and Javascript files of your website as well as storing all the images you want to use. It stores them on the server, so it doesn’t have to load the website from scratch. It saves a lot of the resources needed in loading your website by loading the static version of your site. WP Super Cache is another caching plug-in that is popular with WordPress developers.

• WP Optimize

As each day goes by, WordPress stores every post, comment, page, revisions, trash data, etc, from the plug-ins on your site. Optimizing your database can greatly speed up things. WP Optimize is an easy to use plug-in that de-clutters your database. It does this by removing the old and stale post revisions, spam comments and any trashed items. It will tell you the space you will save by optimizing your database. Beginners and intermediate users will find it easy to set up from the dashboard of the plug-in.

• WP Smush It

One of the key training modules here at Wealthy Affiliate is how to enhance our blog posts and review pages with high quality images. And there are some great places to find license-free pictures and graphics that will fit in beautifully to the killer content you have written.

Problem: If the images are not properly compressed or in the appropriate format, then...

WP Smush It reduces the file sizes and improves their performance by stripping the metadata from JPEGS as well as an unused colors from indexed images. I have used EWW Image Optimizer but after my research on this topic, WP Smush It is the direction I am going.

• BJ Lazy Load

Here is what BJ Lazy Load offers to do for you:

"Lazy loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth. This plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as it gets close to enter the browser window when the visitor scrolls the page. Also works with text widgets.

Since it works with iframes, it also covers embedded videoes from YouTube, Vimeo etc. You can also lazy load other images and iframes in your theme, by using a simple filter."

There are a few plug-ins from the thousands out there that are viewed as top-notch when we need to optimize website speed.

Next, let's consider SEO plug-ins.