Best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins and Tools for 2021

Are you here to find the best WordPress speed optimization plugins and tools? Or facing problems in choosing speed plugins for your site? Then read this article to discover and select the best plugin for your site.

Website speed is one of the important factors for attracting visitors to your website. For a successful online business, a fast and responsive website is the most essential. But if your website is slow, it doesn’t only create a bad user impression; it also harms your SEO ranking in search engines. 

But luckily, there are WordPress speed optimization plugins to save you from such a disaster. The speed plugins provide dozens of features and functionalities to make your website load fast.

Here in this article, we have compiled 21 WordPress speed optimization plugins and tools with their unique features and pricing details. So, keep on reading until the end of the article.

Why Do You Need a Speed Optimization Plugin in WordPress?

Website speed plays a vital role in the growth and success of your site. Website visitors’ interaction on your site directly depends on your website loading speed. If your website loads faster and smoothly, then it’s likely that your site visitors interact more on your site, i.e., view more pages, click links, etc. 

Thankfully, many WordPress speed optimization plugins improve your website loading speed and increase user experiences. Moreover, a fast-loading website can improve your site’s SEO, leading to better search engine rankings. Similarly, the higher site speed makes your site more mobile-friendly, increasing the number of active users of your site.

For example, – You run an online grocery store. When your customers open your site, they want it to load in less than 3 seconds. You’ll lose half of your website visitors if your websites take more than 3 minutes to load. By looking at your site speed, visitors take the necessary action like adding products to the cart, buying them, and even paying. 

So, the speed factor directly determines the growth and success of your online store. Fewer visitors and their interaction lead to the poor performance of your site.

Web Hosting is the Prime WordPress Speed Factor

Various factors affect your WordPress website speed. For example, the amount of content, number of installed WordPress plugins and themes, coding quality, etc. 

But, the prime factor that determines your website speed is your web hosting service, i.e., the quality of hosting, the number of resources allocated to your site. Whatever speed optimization tricks or plugins you use, they’ll work just as much as your hosting allows. 

Hence, choosing a speed-optimized high-quality hosting is a must for making your site speed fast. It’s the first and most vital website loading speed factor.    

However, choosing secure and speedy web hosting for your website can be a little tricky as there are many hosting service providers, each claiming to be the best of all. But it won’t be that difficult either, given a little time in research. 

Always choose the hosting plan that fits the requirement of your website. If your website is running with a large database, select the one that can handle a high increased traffic level, and don’t use shared hosting in such a case. If you have the feeling of getting your website speed slow, switch to other hosting providers.

However, if you’re just a beginner with WordPress, then you can use a shared hosting package or even free web hosting. For a large professional site with a large audience, VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated hosting service is required.

With that said, let’s go ahead and find the best speed optimization plugins for WordPress.

List of WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins

i) All-In-One Speed Optimization Plugins

The all-in-one speed optimization plugins have all the features like caching, lazy loading, image compression, etc. Also, it supports CDN.

1.WP Rocket

With an easy interface and setup, WP Rocket is one of the best WordPress speed optimization plugins. It is considered the best WordPress caching plugin to improve the speed of the website. However, it’s a premium plugin that doesn’t have free or trial plans.

This plugin is packed with all the features of any other plugin. It reduces the HTML, JavaScript, or CSS files weight through the minification process that automatically decreases your load speed. WP Rocket removes the unnecessary whitespace, comments, line-break, and extra character from the code.

Features:

• With its ease of use features, even non-technical abilities, people can use this plugin and start speeding their WordPress website.
• The lazy Loading feature inside WP Rocket displays images and videos only when visitors scroll down the page.
• It automatically cleans your WordPress database unwanted or spam files with the data optimization features.
• This plugin is eCommerce friendly. It supports all the eCommerce plugins you choose.

Pricing: As mentioned earlier, WP Rocket has only a premium version. It starts from $49 – $249 per year.

2. WP-Optimize

A popular all-in-one plugin, WP-Optimize, is best known for its great features in simplifying and optimizing the website. This plugin cleans and optimizes the database, so they run better and improve the website’s performance. It supports both free and premium versions to provide additional advanced features.

The plugin removes all the trash from the database like the trashed post, spam comments revisions, etc., and optimizes it. Moreover, it lets you view the database table and delete the unnecessary table. Not to mention this plugin also compresses the large images with lossy or lossless compression.

Features:

• It supports the caching of each web page.
• The Scheduled cleaning feature lets you set up a fixed and routine schedule to manage your WordPress site and clean it for better performance.
• It allows compressing the image of any image file type JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF, BPM, etc. The auto image compression feature will automatically compress the image once they are loaded on your site.
• It combines and minifies CSS and JavaScript files.

Pricing: You can use basic features for free. Premium plans start from $39 per year.

3.Hummingbird

One of the best WordPress speed optimization plugins, Hummingbird, is all one plugin. This plugin not only makes your site load fast but also improves Google PageSpeed Insights score. It comes with both free and premium versions.

This plugin has become one of the fastest and easiest that allows to speed up a website without the need for additional tools and technical knowledge. Once it’s installed, it scans the overall website and finds the reasons that are slowing down your site.

Features:

• It minifies, combines, and optimizes the CSS and JavaScript files to improve the performance and speed up the website.
• With Hummingbird, you can get the performance report of your site along with guidance on what can be improved on-site to make it better.
• It offers more advanced caching options like Page Caching, Gravatar Caching, Browser Caching, etc.
• Lets you share your content more efficient with GZIP.
• It works with Smush, an image compression and optimization plugin, to make the images of your site load faster, which improves the page speed.

Pricing: For basic features, it is free to use. The premium plan starts at $5 per month, with 7 days of a free trial.

ii) WordPress Caching Plugin

Caching Plugins generated the static HTML page and then store it in the server. Later on, when the user requests or tries to access your website, it provides the information from the lighter HTML page than processing through heavier PHP scripts. That’ll help to load the website speed faster.

1.WP Super Cache

A widely used WordPress Caching plugin WP Super Cache speeds up the performance of the WordPress sites. This plugin loads the website faster by using fewer server resources. The best part is, all the features available in the WP Super Cache plugin are available for free.

This plugin works by storing the static HTML files and data from your dynamic website. Later on, when your site loads again, it’ll serve the cached file instead of loading heavier PHP scripts. This process will automatically decrease your site’s loading speed, leading to a website’s better performance.

Features:

• The setup is easy, simple, and straightforward for beginners and advanced users.
• The cached scheduler feature deletes the cached file at the scheduled time.
• It stores the static data in the local server to increase the load speed time.
• It supports multiple caching types ( Mod_Rewrite, PHP, and Legacy)

Pricing: It is a free plugin.

2.W3 Total Cache

One of the most advanced and powerful WordPress speed optimization plugins is W3 Total Cache. With many caching methods, it has been a popular plugin, among others. Moreover, it’s a completely free plugin with no upgrade plans and prices.

With the W3 Total Cache plugin, you can improve your website’s SEO and user experience by increasing server performance. It also supports CDN (Content Delivery Network), which reduces the load time speed. This plugin is also compatible with all web hosting types like shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting, etc.

Feature:

• Minifying website CSS, HTML, JavaScript code, page, and posts, RSS field, etc. to improve site loading speed.
• It decreases the distance between the user’s location and hosting server, which improves your website loading speed.
• It supports Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP).
• Caching of database objects, fragments in memory, or on disk.

Pricing: It is an entirely free WordPress speed optimization plugin.

3.LightSpeed Cache

An all-in-one site caching plugin of WordPress, LightSpeed Cache improves the load time speed of your website. This plugin also supports other WordPress plugins such as Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, bbPress, etc. It is available for free and upgrades plans.

It works with the LiteSpeed web server’s built-in page cache. The page cache stores the copy of each web page that is displayed on your site that resulting in fast page load time for the visitors. Moreover, it supports multi-site WordPress installation means from a single WordPress dashboard; you can create multiple sites and manage them.

Features:

• Lightspeed Cache is controlled by the server rather than the client or users.
• It supports the Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Comes with attractive and easy to understand interface.
• With this plugin, you can minify inline CSS and JavaScript.

Pricing: As mentioned earlier, it is free to use. Premium plans are available that start at $10 monthly with 15 days free trial period.

4.WP Fastest Cache

One of the top and easiest speed optimization WordPress plugins is WP Fastest Cache. This plugin is best known for its simplicity and ease of use. It is free to use but lacks a few features which you can upgrade with its premium plans.

This plugin minifies the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and creates static HTML files from a dynamic WordPress site. Moreover, the settings page also comes easy to understand with a simple list of checkboxes. It also offers a cache timeout feature, which means the cache files are removed at a specified time.

Features:

• It can enable the GZIP compression, reducing the file’s size when sending it to the server.
• It combines multiple CSS files into one, which decreases the number of HTTP round-trips.
• You can easily upgrade to the premium plans for advanced features from the WordPress dashboard.
• Premium features include image optimization, database cleanup, mobile caching, and a lot more.

Pricing: It is free to use. However, for advanced features, premium plans are available that start at $49.99 for a lifetime.

iii) Image Compression

With the image compression plugin, you can change the size of the image without losing its quality. Also, this type of plugin removes the unwanted part of an image and reduces its size to load fast on the website.

1.WP Smush

An image optimization WordPress plugin WP Smush is one of the top and award-winning plugins. It decreases or optimizes the size of the image without losing its quality. You can use it for free, and for advanced features, switch to its pro version.

It works by removing the unused color from the images without affecting the quality of the image. Moreover, it supports all the image types like JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc. It can also optimize your images from the WordPress media library and any folder or directory images.

Features:

• It can compress upto 50 images at a time with the bulk optimization feature.
• With the Automated Optimization features, images can be automatically compressed once uploaded.
• This plugin highlights the images that are slowing down your site.
• It is compatible with all media library plugins so that it optimizes all the images if you use different media plugins to manage the WordPress media library.

Pricing: It is free to use. It has pro plans, which start from $5 per month for 1 GB of data (about 1000 images) and includes a trial period.

2.Imagify

One of the effective and popular WordPress image compression plugins is Imagify, developed from the same WP Rocket plugin developers. It is ideal for a site that has a lot of images to be compressed. Also, it comes with free and premium plans.

This plugin works with three levels when compressing the images – Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra, which helps to compress the image more or less, looking at the quality. Also, the backup option of Imagify lets you store the original image before compression and restore it later when needed.

Features:

• With Imagify, you can optimize all images types, including thumbnails and retina images from WP Retina 2x.
• It automatically resizes the dimension of the image once widths and heights are given.
• You can optimize JPG, PNG, PDF files and GIFs formats.
• Lets you optimize 20MB of images for free every month.

Pricing: For basic features, it is free to use. However, paid plans come at $4.99 per month for 1GB of data (about 1000 images).

3.TinyPNG

The oldest and most popular online tool for image compression is TinyPNG. It uses smart lossy compression ( It is a method that reduces the size of an image by removing the less important information) techniques to reduce the image size. Actually, it’s not a plugin and is free to use.

You can compress or reduce the size of the image from its official site TinyPNG.com. Upload the JPG or PNG file to the homepage, and you’ll get compressed within a second. Once the compressed image is ready, you can easily download it. Now, these images can be easily uploaded to your WordPress sites.

Features:

• This tool is light-weight and easy to use.
• It reduces the size of PNG and JPEG images without losing the quality of images. Also, the change in the effect of the images is nearly visible.
• At a time, 20 images can be uploaded, and the minimum image size can go upto 5MB.
• You can even compress the animated images.

Pricing: It is entirely free to use.

4. Image optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole

An all-in-one image optimization and compression plugin, Optimole comes with a clean and modern interface. The best part of this plugin is, it has built-in CDN and lazy loading features. It is a free plugin with many more basic features. For advanced features, premium versions are available.

This plugin works with a cloud-based system. It doesn’t replace the media library images. Once Optimole is installed on your site, it’ll replace the image URLs with cloud-based URLs. Once the visitors request the image, the plugin will change the image’s specification transformation, making it load fast and deliver to the visitors. The image compressed by this plugin is perfect for every device.

Features:

• This plugin adds a watermark to your image from being stolen.
• It checks the visitor’s device and browsers so that it can optimize and change the image according to the size of the device and browsers.
• Lets you enable smart cropping to help keep the image well sized without losing focus.
• It detects the retina screens so that it can deliver them with perfect Digital Pixel Ratio (DPR).
• Without using jQuery, you can lazy-load the images, which is good for the site’s better performance.

Pricing: It is free to use. Premium plans start at $19 annually.

iv) Lazy Loading

Using the lazy loading plugin on your website helps load the selected content only when needed. If an image is at the bottom of the page, lazy loading will display the text first and later load the image.

1. Lazy Load by WP Rocket

An easy-to-use and one of the popular speed booster plugins of WordPress is Lazy Load by WP Rocket. This plugin is designed specially by the developers of WP Rocket. It is completely free to use with no upgrade plans and prices.

This plugin loads the images only when they are visible to site visitors. Moreover, it works with videos, text, thumbnails, avatars, iframes, etc. It works by reducing the HTTP request mechanism, which improves the loading speed time of your site.

Features:

• It is simple to install, activate, and use the plugin for your site.
• It doesn’t use JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, which automatically lightens the script’s weight. Lights scripts plugins are easy and fast to load with better performance.
• With the preview thumbnails options, users can replace YouTube iframes videos.
• The lazy load option can be applied to selected images and videos too.

Pricing: It is free.

2.a3 Lazy Load

Everyone’s favorite and simple to use WordPress Lazy Loading plugin is a3 Lazy Load. This plugin is mobile responsive, meaning the optimized content can be viewed on mobile phones, making it the best of all.  It works on a heavy site that has a lot of images. With free to use, it has no premium plans.

With a3 Lazy Load, it allows you to select and choose the elements you want to lazy load. Also, those elements will only be visible to the users when they scroll down the page. It also supports lazy loading options for YouTube, HTML5, and Vimeo videos.

Features:

• It supports images, videos, webP images along with WordPress AMP and better AMP plugins.
• You can enable or disable the lazy loading for posts, custom posts, thumbnails, widgets, etc.
• It gives you the option to lazy load images with a FADE IN or SPINNER effect.
• Built in auto support for WordPress AMP plugins.
• It has full support for the jQuery Mobile Framework.

Pricing: It is free.

3.Lazy Loader

Another best WordPress lazy loading plugin that makes your site load faster is Lazy Loader. This plugin supports images, iFrames, video, and audio elements and uses the lightweight lazy sizes script.

It’s a free WordPress plugin that gives you full control of the content that loads on your site. Besides, with manual modification of the markup, you can lazy load background images, scripts, and styles.

Features:

• Simple and easy-to-use.
• It lets you enable lazy loading for the poster frame of video elements.
• Displays the loading spinner on your site.
• Lets you disable lazy loading for elements with specific CSS classes by defining them via the plugin settings

Pricing: It is free.

v) Content Delivery Network (CDN) Services

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is the geographically distributed servers that increase the website speed loading time by reducing the server and users’ physical distance. CDN connects the users to the nearest data centers and provides results from there when they request any content on your site. This’s how data is loaded fast.

1.MaxCDN (StackPath)

A dedicated and globally distributed server for optimizing the website performance is MaxCDN, currently known as StackPath. It has more than 45+ servers distributed worldwide that will increase the user experience with your site. However, it doesn’t provide its features without the cost and is premium.

Using the fast and high capacity SSD (Solid-State Drives) servers, this plugin helps boost and improve your site’s caching. Moreover, the plugin also provides DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) protection and global Pops (Server location). The StackPath plugin, it’ll deliver the content from more than 200 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds.

Features:

• With easy installation and setup, this plugin is user-friendly, reliable, and fast.
• It provides a free private SSL (Secure socket layer) certificate.
• It offers detailed traffic analytics and GZIP compression.
• This CDN service supports 65Tbps of total throughput across the 45+ locations around the world.

Pricing: Since it’s a premium service, the pricing starts at $20 per month for 1TB of bandwidth, and the price increases accordingly.

2.KeyCDN

One of the powerful and easy-to-use content delivery networks, KeyCDN is a service that makes your site perform better and faster. It has 34 data centers around the world with 100% SSD coverage. However, all the features of KeyCDN are available for premium plans only.

This CDN service offers the best optimization features for your site with many advanced features such as HTTP/2 support, RESTful APIs, Real-time analytics of data, etc. Other services provided by KeyCDN are image optimization, protection of your site from DDoS attacks, GZip compression, etc.

Features:

• Unnecessary content can be removed with a single click.
• With the KeyCDN, you can rank your website higher in search engines.
• It offers services like free SSL certificate, Two-factor identification, bot blocking.
• Website data is restored in all the data centers worldwide so that the website will load the content faster.

Pricing: As mentioned earlier, it’s a premium CDN service where pricing starts from $0.04/GB for 10 TB of bandwidth. The price is quite affordable as compared to other CDN services.

3.Rackspace

Next, we’ve Rackspace which another best CDN service optimizes and improves the speed and security of your website. With this CDN, you can pull content from your website’s origin servers, access restrictions, and purge content from the CDN’s edge nodes.

Rackspace is also a well-known name in cloud computing, hosting, and enterprise-level cloud solutions. It’s one of the top-notch cloud infrastructure that improves the performance of publicly distributed assets.

Features: 

• It’s fully supported via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel.
• Comes with multiple options for using your own domain while serving over HTTPS.
• It provides full portfolio of public, dedicated, and private managed cloud solutions for your workloads.
• Allows you to control who sees your content by setting access rules on the edge nodes.

Pricing: It’s a premium CDN service that offers you a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Its pricing starts from $0.10/GB per month for the first 10TB in North America. 

4.Cloudflare

The popular and best CDN service Cloudflare optimizes and improves the speed and security of your website. Along with speeding up your website, it offers security features, firewalls, speed testing, etc. It is free for basic features and also comes with a pro version with some more advanced features.

The website that uses Cloudflare CDN loads two times faster and uses less than 60% bandwidth.  Cloudflare works by storing duplicate copies of static content such as JavaScript, CSS, image files, etc. on its server. It has more than 193 data centers available globally. This CDN service is an excellent choice for small businesses or websites.

Features:

• It works by blocking the threats of your site to provide security.
• With Cloudflare, you can view analytics data such as total visitors, bandwidth saved, and threats blocked.
• It monitors all the traffic coming to your website. If there is any malicious traffic coming to your site, it blocks them before reaching the server.
• This plugin mainly focuses on security and spam control for your site.

Pricing: For basic features, it is free to use. Premium plans start at $20 per month with many advanced features.

vi) Others 

1.Perfmatters

A lightweight WordPress performance plugin, Perfmatters, enhances the existing load speed time of your website. Without a single coding knowledge, anyone can use this plugin. It is a premium plugin with different upgrade plans.

It works by disabling different features that are not necessary for your site performance. Also, it cleans up the default settings, disables the scripts on per-page basic and other tasks that are slowing your site speed. From this plugin, you can stop loading the code when it isn’t necessary.

Features:

• It improves site performance by reducing the HTTPs request.
• It is compatible with other plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc.
• Supports advanced features like DNS prefetch, preconnect, local Google Analytics script hosting, etc.
• It loads the CSS, JavaScript files only when the visitors are visiting the specific pages.

Pricing: It is free for basic features. Premium plans start at $24.95 per year with advanced features.

2.Heartbeat Control by WP Rocket

An all-in-one plugin of WordPress, Heartbeat Control by WP Rocket comes with a great feature to establish real-time communication between server and browser. Also, it helps to minimize CPU usage. With a lot of basic and advanced features, this plugin is available for free.

Heartbeat Control manages the frequency of WordPress heartbeat API.  Due to WordPress’s heartbeat API, there’ll be communication between server and browser, which makes an AJAX call from the browsers using /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php file.

Whenever, WordPress admin is open for a long time, AJAX requests increase the CPU utilization, leading to your site’s performance issues. In this case, Heartbeat Control by WP Rocket minimizes the CPU utilization by managing the frequency of WordPress Heartbeat API.

Features:

• You can limit or completely stop the WordPress Heartbeat API.
• Heartbeat rules can be separately added for Dashboard, Frontend, Post Editor.

Pricing: It is a free plugin.

3.Autoptimize

One of the popular and lightweight plugins that simplify the process of optimizing the website to load its speed is Autoptimize. It minifies the scripts that remove the unnecessary content and white space from the file, significantly increasing the website speed. This plugin is available for free with no upgrade plans.

Moreover, Autoptimize can cache HTML, CSS, Scripts files, which reduces server load and increases the website speed. Also, it moves the scripts to the footer or page head, which also helps to load the website fast. This plugin is compatible with other plugins like WP Super Cache, HyperCache, Comet Cache, etc.

Features:

• Combines CSS and JavaScript files into one file so that there’s less file to download.
• With the Autoptimize plugin, Google Fonts loading on your site is also optimized.
• Enabling the emoji options lets you remove the WordPress core emoji cruft.

Pricing: It is a free plugin.

4.WP Super Minify

A minification WordPress plugin WP Super Minify increases a website’s speed by compressing the site’s files and images. It minifies the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files to reduce the website loading time. With basic and advanced features inside a single plugin, it is free to use.

Using the Minify PHP framework, it combines the files into a single file to speed up the page load. The size will be quite smaller that’ll help to increase the site performance. This plugin is great for those who only want to perform minification and no other optimization process for their site.

Features:

• The setup is easy and simple to use.
• It allows the option to disable the compression of JavaScript or CSS file.
• Once the plugin is activated, it automatically compresses the inline JavaScript and CSS files.

Pricing: It is free.

Conclusion

With this, it’s a wrap.

In this article, we discussed many different WordPress speed optimization plugins with all their unique functions and features. Using one of these plugins will surely help your site rank higher and keep your visitors satisfied.

When using WordPress speed optimization plugins, always choose the one that you need exactly to help you speed up your site.

WP Rocket is easy to use with tons of optimization features. Similarly, WP Smush is best for image compression that reduces the size of the image without losing its quality. If you just want to minify the files of your site Autoptimize is the one for you.

We hope this article helped you choose the best WordPress speed optimization plugins and Tools for your site.

Did we miss anything important?? If yes, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Next, you should check our article on top free WordPress Live Chat Plugins and Logo Slider Plugins.  

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