There’s nothing more annoying than a site that takes eons to load. We’re sure you’d agree with the sentiment. Over the years, technology has advanced so much that things like site speed are something that your customer expects from your website by default. Now with the cutthroat competition in the market, something as minor as (which it isn’t) site speed could lead your customers to your competitor’s page, which we’re sure you wouldn’t want.
So, now in this race to outrank your competition in the search engine results page (SERP) ranking, site speed plays a crucial role. Your WordPress site must provide your customers with a good user experience (UX) as well as a low bounce rate. Thus, it’s crucial your customer stays on your site and enjoy the experience it provides.
In this article, we’re going to cover what affects the loading time of your WordPress website, and how you can easily resolve it using a plugin.
Related: Learn How to Optimize WordPress Page Load Time
Factors that Affect the Loading Time of a WordPress Site
There are a lot of factors that affect the loading time of WordPress sites. Let’s discuss the ones that top our list here-
- Hosting Providers
A company that offers to host your website on a server so that users can access it online is known as a hosting provider. Load times may be impacted by how server resources are allocated across various hosting companies. For instance, a slow server delivers content more slowly even before it is displayed on the page.
Consider the type of content you’re giving and the expected number of consumers to select the hosting that best suits your needs. Decide if a shared hosting service or a VPS hosting firm is better for your needs by comparing several providers who can meet these requirements.
To hasten the server-side distribution of your data, you can also use a content delivery network (CDN).
- Page File Size (Total Content on Your Page)
Your page file size, also known as page weight, refers to the total size of a given web page. Usually, it takes longer for a page to load the larger it is. The size of your page gets affected by the unneeded code and it makes the page more clumsy than necessary. You can minify code, use lazy load and other capabilities to delay content rendering, remove bulky elements and files, and other techniques to shorten the time it takes for a page to load.
To do this, keep in mind that visitors to your website are doing so with a purpose in mind. Therefore, be sure to get rid of anything superfluous from your pages and concentrate on the substance. For instance, avoid adding any pointless widgets that offer nothing to your visitors.
- Individual Element Size (Images on Your Page)
Although high-quality image files might make your website more appealing as standalone elements, they also have large file sizes that significantly slow down page loads. Your website will load considerably more slowly if the images, animated gifs, videos, and other material are not performance optimized.
Your website can send photos more quickly by compressing images to minimize their file size without significantly lowering quality.
- WordPress Themes and Plugins
A WordPress theme determines the look of your website or blog. It is a collection of documents such as style sheets, code, and images that control the look of your website. If there is no content delivery network (CDN), if the code is complicated or badly designed, or if it isn’t appropriate for the volume of traffic you receive, WordPress themes may cause your site to load slowly.
You must select WordPress plugins and themes that are optimized for speed and can minify the code of your current theme to lessen the overall load on your server.
It can be easier to decide which WordPress plugins you need for your site if you are aware of the various aspects that have an impact on site speed. We have a variety of plugins selected for you, whether you need to minify your code, eliminate unneeded files, or optimize photos.
Top Plugins to Help Your WordPress Site Load Faster
Here are some of the top plugins that can help your WordPress site load faster. However, before we proceed further, we want to mention this as a caution that using too many plugins together might adversely affect your site load time instead of reducing it. We recommend you use a few plugins that match the needs of your business and help your site avoid complications.
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the most used premium caching plugins for WordPress. More than 900,000 websites trust it, including well-known brands in the WordPress industry. It is renowned for its one-click, hassle-free configuration and is the preferred option for both new and experienced users.
What we like about the plugin-
The stunning user interface of WP Rocket is without a doubt its best feature. But WP Rocket distinguishes itself from the competition in more ways than just the UI. In addition-
- Configuration with one click. Caching is automatically activated after you install and activate the plugin.
- Built-in compatibility with WooCommerce support that is ready to go and doesn’t require any additional configuration.
- Internal slow loading- Instead of downloading all of the photos at once, only download the ones you need.
2. W3 Total Cache
One of the best and most complete cache plugins for WordPress is W3 Total Cache. Today, it still has over a million active installs, but when it wasn’t updated for months at a time and premium support requests went unanswered, there were some negative headlines. Since BoldGrid (a specialized WordPress company) purchased W3 Total Cache in 2019, things have unquestionably gotten better.
It addresses several factors that affect any website’s performance. It goes beyond the fundamentals and does more than just lessen CPU usage (load) or bandwidth usage for HTML pages.
What we like about the plugin-
It has a ton of features and is well-known in the WordPress caching community; with BoldGrid’s new investment, it will only get better.
- To get started, the W3 Total Cache plugin doesn’t require you to change your theme, your .htaccess (mod rewrite rules), or you’re programming.
- It is the only plugin made to optimize both small and large practical hosting settings.
3. WP Super Cache
With more than 2 million installations, WP Super Cache is one of the most widely used caching plugins for WordPress. Your site is undoubtedly in good hands because Automattic (of WordPress.com renown) maintains and develops it.
What we like about the plugin-
Given that it is maintained by Automattic, you can be sure that the development is of the highest caliber, and it includes only the features you require in a caching plugin. The user interface isn’t as attractive as WP Rocket’s, but it’s still a great plugin with a good reputation, to keep things simple.
4. Gonzales
Gonzales is a straightforward and lightweight application that enables you to remove unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files that have been registered by themes and plugins from your overcrowded website. As you add new plugins to your website, their associated files will load every time you access them, slowing down the entire process.
The Gonzales plugin, for instance, allows you to prohibit style files from loading on sites where they are not necessary if you install a contact form, gallery, or slider plugin that has them. By suspending specific files while not in use, this function will help you increase the speed of your website.
What we like about the plugin-
- Other speed-up plugins like WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, Cache Enabler, and others are supported by it.
- Specific JS and CSS files can be easily disabled on various pages and posts using the user interface (UI) options.
- Responsive and prompt user help, responding to user questions in 1–12 hours.
5. WP-Optimize
WP-optimize was originally designed as a tool to clean and optimize your WordPress database, but it has now evolved into a comprehensive performance plugin for WordPress. Even though the new route the plugin has gone in hasn’t been well received by everyone, we think it’s been a success and has added a ton of features that make it one of the finest caching plugins for WordPress.
Your WordPress site will load quickly and remain uncluttered as a result. This plugin makes your site faster by cleaning out all the extra database strings and auto draughts without using manual queries to improve your database.
What we like about the plugin:
WP-Optimize includes the ability to cache your website, optimize your site, and compress your photos in addition to anything else you could want from a WordPress speed plugin. While other plugins provide this, such as WP Rocket, they often need to be installed separately. You only need WP-Optimize, which only requires one plugin.
- It is based on the fastest caching system in the world.
- With the plugin, users can optimize and compress their image files.
- There is the possibility to minify asynchronous JavaScript and CSS.
6. Smush
Smush is one of the most widely used plugins for image optimization, which has a significant impact on how quickly your website loads. The moment you add a picture to a page or post, Smush will asynchronously process it. Additionally, users don’t need to worry about image quality being affected because the plugin reduces pixel size with barely perceptible changes.
What we like about the plugin:
- Without monthly restrictions, the Smush plugin optimizes all of your photographs up to 5MB in size for free forever.
- It has a “Bulk Smush” tool that allows you to quickly optimize and compress up to 50 photos.
7. DB manager
Another excellent database manager WordPress plugin that can significantly speed up your WordPress website is DBManager. It cleans up empties tables, optimizes the database, fixes the database, backs up the database, restores the database, deletes the backup database, and executes a few queries.
What we like about the plugin:
- In the event of an attack or server issue, the DBManager plugin automatically backs up your database and logs the files.
- The DBManager dashboard displays admin database information so you can see what might be wrong with your database.
8. EWWW Image Optimizer
Another great WordPress plugin to speed up your site is EWWW Image Optimizer. As you post photographs to your website, it automatically and without any loss of quality optimizes them. Additionally, it can optimize already submitted photos.
What we like about the plugin:
- The EWWW Image Optimizer plugin automatically checks for images that need to be optimized.
- provides capabilities for bulk image optimization.
9. Speed Booster Pack
As the name implies, this plugin examines all the factors that affect site speed, including the server configuration and WordPress setup, and makes adjustments to speed up the loading process.
Scripts that slow down the loading of your website are moved to the footer by the Speed Booster Pack. JavaScript and CSS that are external and render-blocking are removed from above-the-fold content. This plugin eliminates query strings from static resources, a common contributor to slow loading times.
What we like about the plugin:
- Three crucial fundamental web vitals that can be enhanced by the Speed Booster Pack are the largest contentful paint (LCP), total blocking time (TBT), and cumulative layout shift (CLS) metrics.
- Offers the ability to optimize images.
10. NitroPack
NitroPack is an all-inclusive performance improvement service. It integrates all the elements required for a website to load quickly. NitroPack includes everything you need, including image optimization, code minification, caching, CDN, and slow loading.
NitroPack is a much more CPU-efficient solution than traditional caching plugins as all of its optimizations are carried out in the cloud. This quality makes NitroPack quite lightweight.
What we like about the plugin:
- NitroPack is extremely easy to set up. You do not need to follow a 15-step installation process or have coding expertise to set up the plugin.
- It poses absolutely no risk to the existing original site files.
- It provides exciting features such as optimized images, Cloudflare CDN, Defer CSS & JS, Font rendering optimization, and more.
Conclusion:
You need to fix the speed issues with your WordPress site if you want to provide a good experience to your users and at the same time attract a new audience to your site. You can apply multiple tactics to ensure that your site loads quickly and can aid in boosting your exposure and organic visitors. So, make sure to choose plugins and tools that will achieve this.
