WordPress is used by most websites today. Your online business can grow if your website visitors get converted into customers.
This can happen if you value their time and money. For example, if a visitor wants to buy some product that is listed on your site, they will want to check it instantly.
If your site speed is good, then this visitor may go ahead and buy the product before going away.
But, if your site speed is slow and the customer cannot afford to waste their time, you could lose this potential client. This is a loss for you. And in business, everyone tries their best to reduce losses. Losses eat away the profits.
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Why do you need fast loading speed?
Page speed plays a crucial role for online businesses. If you wish to increase the loading page speed of your WordPress, you will need to incorporate caching plugins of WordPress.
These plugins will help the page load quickly. In this article, we will tell you about the three best WordPress page speed plugins.
Before that, understand what “cache” means. When data is stored temporarily from a site, it is called cache. The stored data helps in reopening that site quickly.
Data is stored by caching in a storage location that is temporary. This stored data let the system get access to the website/data faster.
Basically, WordPress is an application that manages content. When your website is opened by a visitor or user, information is collected from the database, and many steps are run by WordPress before the page of the website opens on the visitor’s browser.
This slows down the page speed when too many users are trying to open it together.
Caching helps WordPress to skip intermediate steps. Once a page opens, its data is stored by this caching plugin.
Later, this stored data gets sent to the site user when they try opening that same page in the future. This helps reduce the page load times.
Best Cache Plugins for Fast Loading Page Speed
1. WP Rocket
The best performance WordPress plugin today is WP Rocket. This caching plugin is premium. It is easy to use and is user-friendly. It offers many different options and features for optimization. Advanced users and beginners both, will find it very beneficial.
WP Rocket Features & Benefits
- User-friendly interface
- Page Speed can be improved with minimum tweaks
- Removal of unnecessary code and file size reduction of Javascript, HTML
- Copies of web pages are stored once they are visited by you. This is page caching
- Cache pre-loading can be disabled or enabled by you
- Images are loaded lazily: Only after the loading of the main content will the web page images get loaded
- Caching rules that are advanced
- The database can be completely optimized
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) integration
- Cloudflare integration is provided directly
- Seamless integration of Google Analytics
- Settings can be imported and exported
- Execution of Javascript is delayed
- The database can be rolled back to the state it was in previously.
Features available immediately after WP Rocket is activated for fast loading page speed
Page Caching – Your site speed of loading will be very quick with the help of this feature. This, in turn, can boost your website’s conversion rate and SEO (Search Engine Optimization.
Cache Pre-loading – Faster-cached content will be enjoyed by your website visitors. The cache is pre-loaded by WP Rocket when you modify your site pages. This all happens automatically.
Browser caching – This lets you store data that is accessed most commonly. This data is stored in a local memory which could be a mobile phone or a desktop.
GZIP Compression – This feature lets you compress web pages on the server and decompress itin the browser. When you do this, the data file size decreases. And your site visitors are able to view the content quickly.
eCommerce Optimization – Ecommerce sites are able to run smoothly and fast.
Excellent Compatibility – In terms of compatibility, WP Rocket is good. It is very compatible with all themes. Also, it works smoothly with the best WordPress hosting platforms.
Customized features to have fast loading page speed
File size reduction: Your site’s data file size is related to the page load time of your website. The bigger the file, the slower will be the page load time. WP Rocket helps you to compress CSS files, Javascript files to smaller files.
Load media files: There is this smart feature that is related to media image loading. This feature lets you hold up the loading of certain images.
LazyLoad is the name of this feature. Because of this feature, the images get loaded only if the user requires them. All the images do not open if they are not needed.
This feature helps improve the website performance. User bandwidth is saved since it is not important to have all images downloaded. A cache file can be created by WP Rocket to store WebPimages.
Clean database: Tidier the database, the more efficiently it will run. Also, your website speed will be improved. WP Rocket does help to tidy up and clean the database.
You are allowed to delete posts and comments. Auto cleanups could also be scheduled. By clicking once or twice, everything is made possible.
Reducing latency: When your target base is international, a CDN is important to improve the page load time of your site. CDN helps by increasing the page load time of your web page when your audience is located away from your server. WP Rocket can have CDN easily integrated into it. Also, Rocket CDN could be used by you.
WP Rocket has many different add-ons to improve further these available features:
- Facebook Pixel
- Varnish Cache
- Google Tracking
- Sucuri integration.
- Cloudflare integration
Just a click and these all will be controlled.
2. NitroPack
The plugin that is rated as the highest for website performance optimization today is NitroPack. Anything that a website needs to run faster can be combined by it.
It has all the features like caching, CDN, image optimization, LazyLoad, code minification, and so on.
Optimization can be done by NitroPack, even when it is a cloud network. This plugin solution hence is considered to be lightweight. Many features are provided by NitroPack that need no further configuration.
These Features are :
Amazon CloudFront CDN: Static assets are provided automatically from the Amazon CDN.
Image Optimization: Automatic optimization of all images is made possible. And your images are made in to WebP files.
Cache Warmup: The most important and critical web pages of your site are optimized irrespective of the load time.
Few unique benefits and features of NitroPack
Simple and easy setup: Getting a NitroPack installed and started is super easy. No special settings or tech configurations are needed.
The configuration can be done without any technical knowledge. You have the option to choose the level of optimization you wish to have. It could be Strong, Medium, Standard, or Ludicrous.
No damage to original site files: Work is done on on-site file copies. And if you are not happy with its results, then you are allowed to delete the cache and commence afresh. No alterations are made to the original files of the site.
When you decide to remove NitroPack, the website will return to its old form. Your website will look just the way it was initially before you installed NitroPack.
Cache Invalidation: You can invalidate cache files. There is no need to purge them. By doing this, your users are served cache by NitroPack while the new copy of the cache is being generated simultaneously in the background.
It is an effective feature when there is high traffic. It lets you update your site, and at the same time, your users are provided with a cache. All this happens automatically.
CSS for unique layouts: One CSS file is provided by many plugins today per post. Your CSS will not change even if there are many site pages having the same post with different layouts.
NitroPack identifies this and generates a new CSS for unique layouts. It also differentiates between mobile devices and desktops. It uses different types of CSS for every device type.
Other Important Features:
- Minify HTML
- Minify script tags and JavaScript files
- Compression of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
- GZip compression
- Image Optimization
- Convert to WebP
- Image Lazy loading
- iFrame Lazy loading
- Amazon CDN
- Previews of YouTube image
- Defer JavaScript and CSS
- Compatibility with a mobile device, desktop
- Scheduled posts supported
- eCommerce compatibility
- Various languages supported
- AutomaticCache management. When you update or edit your website data, cache files get updated.
- Options to eliminate web pages from cached and any resources that you don’t wish to optimize
- No need for a database connection
NitroPack Marketing Campaigns
Two issues usually come up when running the campaign online. One issue is that a unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is sent by each visitor.
The second issue is that when you update your site’s content, you lose the cache memory. To handle such issues, NitroPack has specifically designed two features.
- The parameters of the campaign in the link are recognized and ignored by NitroPack while searching for the cache file to fulfill the request for the campaign.
- The cache is purged by caching plugins and rebuild when you update or edit your site’s content. If this happens when there is heavy traffic, your website users will not get these cache files. Thus slowing the page load time. And, this will, in turn, affect directly the number of page hits for your site.
This issue is solved by NitroPack by getting the cache files invalidated and not purged. By doing this, NitroPack can get cache files updated in the background.
Cache files that are old get sent to your visitors. This is done without hampering their activity. It happens automatically.
3. W3 Total Cache
Your website’s user interface and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are improved by W3 Total Cache. All this is made possible by reducing the page load time, which is done through the usage of features like CDN (Content Delivery Network) and many other recent practices. You can also check our article on 5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For An Ecommerce Site.
When it comes to WordPress, this is the most commonly used WPO framework. W3TC is the best solution if you want to optimize your WordPress site.
Key Benefits:
- There is an overall improvement when it comes to the page ranking on search engines. It is best suited for sites that use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and those that are optimized for phones.
- 10x minimum improvement is guaranteed for the website’s overall web page performance. When the configuration is done properly, it provides improvement of Grade A level.
- The conversion rate of your ecommerce site is improved. This directly helps in improving the Google ranking of your website.
- Pages are rendered quickly. This allows users to have quicker interaction.
- There is a reduction in the page load time. Hence, visitors spend extra time when on your site. More pages can be viewed by them as a result in a shorter span of time.
- The performance of the webserver is also increased. During high traffic volume times, it is able to sustain itself.
- If CSS, Javascript, and HTML are minified, you can save 80 percent bandwidth.
Key Features
- It is very compatible with shared hosts, dedicated servers, clusters of dedicated servers, and virtual or private servers.
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is supported.
- Minified content posts and pages are cached in the memory or on the disk.
- Compressed or minified Javascript, CSS is cached in the memory or on the disk.
- Website, categories, search results, comments and tags, are cached in the memory or on the disk.
- Search engine page results are cached in the memory or on the disk.
- Database objects or content are cached in the memory or on the disk.
- Objects are cached in the direct memory or on the disk.
- Caching of objects in direct memory or on disk.
- Caching of data fragments in memory or on disk.
- W3TCcaching methods include local Disk, APCU, Redis, Memcached, eAccelerator, APC, etc.
- Minifying HTML, JavaScript and CSS using systematic control.
- Deferring the not so important JavaScript and CSS for faster loading of pages.
- Using LazyLoad to defer media images or content so that critical data can be loaded before the media images.
- Directly importing different attachments to CDN and media files.
- Multiple CDN systems integration leveraged so that images can be optimized.
- Security features of various kinds to provide safety to your website.
- All statistics related to caching are saved. These can later be used to have insights into the website performance.
- Reverse proxy integration is allowed through Nginx or Varnish.