According to an article published at the Kissmetrix blog, 40% of the users quit the websites that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Considering you run an online business or run a blog, 40% is a serious metric to deal with (or to avoid either). One can’t just let go of those 40% users. Ironically, despite being so vital, loading time is often ignored. To run a website online efficiently, and to maximize conversions you need to tweak up your website’s loading times. Due to the fact that a large number of websites use WordPress, In this post I’ll break down five plugins that help you speed up your blog.

Top 5 Free Plugins to Super Charge Your WordPress Blog’s Speed

Before you begin, I suggest you take a test of your Website’s Speed test on pingdom tools. To begin, Visit Pingdom Tools, and Enter your Website’s URL and hit “Test Now“. A quick test would reveal you the factors that might be holding back your blog’s performance. From the pingdom report, you can see which plugins effect your blog speed more. Once you have finished, you can start working and tweaking up your blog.

Top 5 Plugins to Super Charge Your WordPress Blog’s Speed

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1 - WP Super Cache

There are dozens of caching plugins in the WordPress plugin repository.
There are premium plugins for caching as well, however WP super cache stands as the most used plugin for caching. FYI, it is free of cost as well !

If you aren’t familiar with caching, let me break it down for you.
When a user visits your website/blog, a copy of your website’s that particular page is downloaded temporarily in his browser cache and cookies.

Considering the fact that the reader visits your blog again, his browser would have to re-download all the resources again. To save all this hustle, webmasters suggest the use of “Caching“. Under this, resources once download are stored in cache to enhance user experience.

Download

2 - WP Minify

CSS ( Cascading style sheets ) files, and JS ( Javascript ) files have a great impact on your blog’s loading time.

When it comes to WordPress, the problem gets to next level. That is because several plugins come with separate CSS file and Javascript files.

You can sort things out by using WP Minify plugin. This plugin once activated minifies CSS and JS files to speed wordpress website.

Download

3 - JS and CSS Script Optimizer

Another plugin you would find helpful for speeding up the performance of your wordpress installation is JS and CSS script optimizer.

This plugin takes up a different aspect to cut down on your loading times.

It combines all your theme, plugin’s CSS files and JS files into one and minifies them for minimum load time. I’ve tested it on several blogs and it worked on most of them.

It can cut down loading times to a great extent if you have a lot of plugins installed. The plugin also has an option to has a feature for you to add CSS and JS files on your own.

Download

4 - WP Optimize

WordPress is a database based CMS ( Content management system ). Not only its database stores records of your posts, pages, comments and similar things. It also keeps a record of any possible change you do while playing with your blog.

This can include changing themes, plugins, post revisions and much more. Over the passage of time, this data grows to be huge and gets to be a problem.

This is where WP optimize comes to your rescue. It helps you optimize your database, clean auto drafts, remove spam comments and much more.

Download

5 - Smush it

Images too take up a large part of your wordpress directory. This might not serve as a problem in the starting, however, as the blog grows, it can be a heck of thing to deal with.

You can’t just go ignoring images in your blog. They help you explain the topic easily and makes it more easy for the readers to understand.

We are also aware of the fact that how popular are infographics. This makes it essential to optimize images for best performance.

The plugin helps you optimize your images from inside the WordPress dashboard. It automatically optimizes the images on the go as you upload them on the go.

Bonus plugin : Before finishing this list, I want to drop another plugin. It is Plugin Security Scanner, a free plugin that scans your plugins for security loop holes. Why you need this plugin ? It is a mere possibility that a plugin you use might have vulnerabilities. These can include malware, loop holes and similar things. The plugin scans your installed plugins for such vulnerabilities that might be effecting your blog’s speed.

Conclusion - Speed is one of the most essential elements that can make or doom a blog.

Here is something I’d recommend. If you checked your blog’s speed before installing the plugins, try checking your blog’s loading time again after installing and configuring these plugins. You are welcome to share your results in the comments below.

Now, there are certainly more plugins than what I mentioned in the post. If you use any plugin to speed up your blog, tell me in the comments below, I’d love to include it in the list.