What is the Best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugin
Here are 7 popular speed optimization plugins that you can use to speed up your WordPress website. And by the end of this article you’ll know the pros and cons of these plugins.
1) WP Rocket
WP Rocket has:
- Caching
- 2 methods of optimizing JS(Delay JS, Defer JS)
- 2 methods of optimizing CSS (Reduce unused CSS, Async loading)
- Lazyload (Iframe, Image and Background images)
- Add missing image sizes
- Integration with CDNs like Cloudflare
Caching is very simple and WP Rocket does that just right and automatic cache-clearing is seamless. Similarly I like its lazyload yet sometimes activating lazyload can reduce your PageSpeed scores and speed. You need to know what you’re doing, it can’t do it for you.
Integration with CDNs is good and error-free.
Css optimization… ” Reduce unused CSS” method rarely works properly, almost always introduces issues so I wouldn’t recommend that. “Async css” can sometimes cause design issues as well I so be careful.
Defer JS usually works fine yet Delay JS almost always will give you issues, you need to make sure you don’t have any javascript errors.
Overall, it’s a good caching plugin that can do decent lazyload and somewhat okay css and js optimization, to get maximum performance from WP Rocket though, you need to be a speed specialist (like me lol)
2) Nitropack
I won’t waste your time, Nitropack has same features as WP Rocket. Nitropack is more expensive and they have livechat. If you don’t need the livechat, you’ll be paying extra for almost no benefits in my opinion. Nitropack has a CDN yet one of the best CDNs Cloudflare is free anyways. But it will work as good as WP Rocket so it’s a decent plugin.3) W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache can be very annoying to work with, sometimes you make changes to the page and you won’t see it even after clearing the cache. Overall, it’s bug-prone css and js optimization features are not advanced yet you can use it if you don’t want to pay for a premium plugin.
4) WP Optimize
WP Optimize has somewhat decent CSS optimization yet JS optimization is very poor. And caching-wise it’s very bug-prone, I saw many issues regarding cache. Sometimes cache files don’t get cleared and you get gigabytes of cache files which can be annoying.
Similar to W3 Total Cache not a great plugin yet it can be used for its cache if you don’t have the budget.
5) WP Meteor
WP Meteor is not a full-array speed optimization plugin. It only covers JS optimization. It doesn’t have an intuitive user interface that confuses things abit, overall if you know what you’re doing you can utilize this plugin to delay javascript files to speed up your website.
You definitely need a caching plugin which WP Meteor isn’t, yet, as solid caching plugins include delay js features too, I don’t like WP Meteor that much as it would require me to use multiple plugins to get caching + js optimization.
6) Flying Scripts
Identical to WP Meteor.
7) Litespeed Cache
When used right, Litespeed cache plugin is a free premium plugin! But it only works on Litespeed web servers. And similar to all plugins sometimes there can be conflicts.
Whenever I have a client with litespeed web server I give this plugin a try before going for paid options
The Conclusion
You can use these plugins to speed up your website yet I wouldn’t recommend any of the advanced settings for optimizing CSS and JS. Just use caching and that is the best you can do if you don’t know about the technical details. That’s my opinion anyways.
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