Learn about the most important WordPress website acceleration plugins

There is no doubt that website loading speed is an important factor for any website you browse on the Internet, and for any website built using the WordPress system in particular.

One of the biggest downsides to WordPress as a content management system is speed. One of the most common problems that WordPress website owners face is the slow loading speed of their website pages, which prompts them to search for solutions to increase their speed and efficiency.

In today’s article, we help you learn more about concepts related to your site’s speed, how to measure your site’s speed, and whether it is slow, fast, or average speed. We help you diagnose the reasons for your site’s slowness, and finally we suggest to you a group of the best free and paid WordPress site acceleration plugins.

How to make a website fast

Do you know how fast your website loads? On what basis do you determine whether it is a fast or slow site, and does it need measures to speed it up and improve its performance?

According to Google , the page load time should be between one to three seconds at most for the site to be generally considered fast. What is meant by website page loading time is the time it takes for a visitor to view the content of that page after arriving at a page.

If your site does not load within three seconds or less, this means that Google considers your site slow. It also means that most of your site visitors will leave it without seeing its content!

In some types of sites, the speed scale is more stringent. For example, in online stores, the minimum speed for Google is only two seconds, and statistics indicate that more than 87% of shopping carts are abandoned if the loading time is longer than that. The same applies to live video streaming sites or gaming sites, where the speed standard is more stringent.

You should pay attention to speeding up your site, as this enhances your site’s rank in the search engine, strengthens your brand, makes people view more pages on the site, increases the conversion rate and also increases the purchase rate if your site is an online store .

How do you measure website speed accurately?

In fact, calculating the loading speed of your site in general through the time to load a page on your site in seconds is not considered an accurate and sufficient measure to judge the speed or slowness of the site for several reasons.

The speed varies from one page to another on the site and from one user to another according to the content of each page, the speed of Internet browsing, the type of browser, etc.

Also, not all web pages are downloaded at once, but rather they are downloaded part after another, and the speed varies from time to time and cannot be judged at a specific moment.

Therefore, determining the speed of your website as a fixed number is not accurate, so several other metrics are adopted to judge a site as fast or not by tools dedicated to checking site speed, and each tool has its own metrics.

The most popular tools that you can use to test your website’s loading speed are:

GTmetrix This tool is one of the most widely used speed testing tools on the web, and it is available in a free and paid version. Through this tool, you can enter the URL address, determine the actual geographical location of any site whose speed you want to test, and specify the type of browser. The tool will analyze your site and give you several results, grades, and graphs for its speed metrics. It will also show you warnings about errors in your site that you must pay attention to and correct.
Google Page Speed : This tool from Google measures the time it takes from the moment a website is requested to the moment it is ready to display in the browser. It evaluates the speed of the website through several metrics that it uses to test page load. Through them, you can verify that your site is technically fast on mobile devices and desktop computers. It also provides you with several tips to improve the performance of your site.
Web Page Test : It is a free tool to test the performance and speed of website pages. This tool produces its metrics using real-world browsers to load the web page being tested. The main advantage of this tool is that tests can be run from locations around the world using real browsers and at actual connection speeds allowing you to test performance from where users are actually located and see real loading times.
Pingdom Website Speed Test : It is an easy-to-use tool. The tool is available in a free version and a paid professional version. This tool features its own speed tests. Simply enter the URL of your web page and select the test area and the tool will test your page loading speed and calculate performance metrics. It also monitors your websites, apps, and servers and monitors loading performance so you can see how visitors are experiencing your site.
IsItWP : This site is a site specialized in learning WordPress and it aims to help beginners and small companies learn everything related to the WordPress system, templates, and plugins. This site provides a free, easy-to-use tool that you can rely on to test the speed of your WordPress site.

After selecting the tool you prefer, you must understand its metrics and know how to read them. Based on that, you can judge your site as fast, medium-fast, or slow according to each measure accurately and with certainty.

If your website is slow according to tests of specialized tools, this means that you need to start taking steps that will increase the speed of your site and improve its performance.

Why is my WordPress site slow?

In fact, there are several reasons that cause your website to slow down, the most prominent of which are:

1-Bad hosting

Website hosting plays an important role in its speed. Shared hosting , for example, stores several websites on one server, so in this type of hosting, if other websites on the server are consuming resources, this will slow down your site as well.

While cloud hosting uses multiple servers – and these servers may be distributed across several geographical regions – they form a cloud and work integrated with each other as one giant server. This type of hosting is easily scalable and expandable, and the speed of your site does not depend on the traffic of any other site.

If one of the servers is unable to handle the volume of incoming requests for your site, this task will be taken over by other servers on the cloud. This will solve the problem of access time and increase the speed of the site.

To learn more about web hosting and its different types, we advise you to read the following article .

2- The large number of heavy elements on the site

80% of the page load time is consumed to load and display all the different elements on the page, whether it is code such as CSS or Javascript codes, plugins, images, or contact forms.. and each element on your website has a certain weight.

Therefore, the more heavy elements on your web pages, the longer it will take to display them, so you must be careful to reduce the weight of your site elements to make it faster.

Overall, keep your site simple and delete anything you don’t use. Also remove everything you don’t need, even if it’s a small widget, and focus on only the essential content and core functionality you need.

It is also preferable to minimize the codes in the HTML files, Javascript files, and CSS files used on the site (Minification), remove unnecessary or redundant data from them, and postpone loading the CSS or JavaScript files until the end so that your website is displayed to visitors faster.

Lots of AJAX codes

Ajax technology enables you to update part of a web page without having to reload the entire page. Having Ajax codes can be very useful for your website and enhance site functionality such as search functionality within site content for example.

But on the other hand, these codes may also cause the site to slow down because they drain the server’s central processing unit (CPU), so be sure to maintain a reasonable amount of AJAX codes on your site’s pages.

Too much and unoptimized media

Some of your pages may be slow due to the large number of images and extra media. Although most of us now have a fast Internet connection, it is still important to compress images on your site, especially if the site’s hosting resources are limited.

Therefore, you must add the media in the correct format, be of the required size, and save it to suit the web. You must also pay attention to improving the images, compressing them, and reducing their size either before uploading them to the site through specialized programs such as Photoshop, or after uploading them to the site using WordPress plugins that work to compress and improve the images.

Too many or poorly written additions

A slow WordPress site could be caused by one of the heavy plugins installed on the site. The more plugins you have, the slower your site is likely to be.

To make sure that plugins do not affect your site speed, disable them one by one and test the effect on your site speed. If you find a plugin slowing down your site, this is most likely due to it being poorly programmed, just remove it and find a better alternative.

It is also necessary to delete any unnecessary plugins that you do not use and remove them from their roots, as this will reduce the weight of your WordPress site.

Use a slow template for your site

Heavy WordPress themes that are overcrowded with features or that are poorly written and unoptimized code will make your WordPress site noticeably slow.

The easiest way to test if the theme you are using on your site is slow is to use the default theme that comes with WordPress. If the site remains slow then the problem is something else.

So make sure to choose a WordPress theme that is fast and includes only the features you need. To learn more about testing template speed and knowing the fastest WordPress templates that can be installed on your site, we advise you to read the following article.

Do not use caching

Not supporting caching on your WordPress website means that every time someone visits one of your pages, the website must load all the elements from scratch.

While relying on loading them from the cache, which stores your website data on the user’s device for use in future requests, will speed up the site significantly because the website browser in this case will need to load only the updated or new parts of the page when visiting the site again. Which increases page loading time even on a slow connection.

Too many redirects

Actually redirects don’t necessarily hurt your website speed, but having too many redirects can slow down your website.

Because redirects create an extra HTTP request and response cycle and add extra round-trip response time, it’s important to reduce the number of redirects your site issues as much as possible so its speed doesn’t suffer.

There are many measures that you can take to eliminate the causes of site slowness mentioned above and increase the speed of your WordPress site . But in the following paragraphs, we will talk about site acceleration through plugins that easily speed up your WordPress site once they are installed and set up correctly.

The best WordPress website acceleration plugins

Below are some of the most important free and paid WordPress website acceleration plugins that you will need to use if your WordPress website is slow, and an explanation of the most important features that each plugin provides in order to get rid of the problem of slow website.

1-W3 Total Cache

This add-on can significantly increase the speed of your WordPress site by enabling caching on your WordPress site, which is considered one of the most important factors that help speed up the site and significantly improve its performance.

A WordPress site requests a lot of data from the database while loading dynamic pages (PHP pages) and displaying them to the visitor. This can greatly affect the speed and performance of the site, especially when you have many visits to your website and you have a lot of plugins installed on it. your location.
This plugin limits the number of requests to the database, and once you activate it on your site, you will notice a noticeable speed improvement immediately, even with the default settings.

You can also control and customize the add-on settings yourself so that you get a faster page. The plugin also compresses different types of files and has other features that contribute to increasing the speed of your WordPress site.

The add-on is available in a free version from the official repository of WordPress add-ons, and a paid, more professional version, but the paid version is only available from within the free add-on interface, and there is no discount on licensing the add-on for more than one site, meaning that if you need to install the add-on on ten sites, you will pay $99 per year. For each site separately.

2-WP Rocket

This plugin is considered one of the important plugins that provides caching solutions for your site, as this plugin creates a dynamically generated copy of each page of your WordPress site and stores it temporarily in cache memory, which reduces the workload on your server. It is a paid add-on and its price starts from $49 per year, and you can get the plans and prices from here

The add-on also provides a lazy loading feature . Instead of loading the entire page at once, only the parts that the visitor is viewing at the current moment are loaded, and the rest of the parts are loaded when visitors scroll down the page.

This add-on also works to minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files and reduce their size. It should be noted here that caution must be taken when using add-ons that minify JS, HTML, and CSS codes, whether this add-on or any other add-on that does so, as sometimes a conflict occurs between the template used on the site and these add-ons.

This add-on also includes other features such as increasing the cache size of the user’s browser, and integrating the caching solution with the content delivery network ( CDN ), which is a network of servers spread in specific geographical locations with the aim of delivering content faster based on the server closest to you.

3-WP Super Cache

This plugin is one of the most popular caching plugins, it is free and has over 1 million active installations. It is a plugin from Automattic, the company responsible for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Jetpack.

This plugin basically creates static pages from your dynamic WordPress site and stores them temporarily, after which the web server will serve these static pages instead of processing the relatively heavier dynamic PHP scripts.

The extension also provides the feature of compressing cached files to obtain smaller compressed files. This improves the loading time and downloading of these files by browsers more quickly due to their small size.

4-WP Optimize

This add-on is characterized by being a comprehensive add-on (All-in-one Solution) as it works to speed up the WordPress site in all aspects instead of being just an add-on to enable caching only or improve images only.

This add-on provides several features, the most important of which is caching the site, cleaning the site database from any unnecessary data, and minifying CSS and Javascript files.

It also compresses site images using advanced compression techniques to convert large images into small, fast-loading compressed files. It uses Gzip compression, which is known as browser compression or HTTP compression, which works to compress and reduce the size of files and reduce the duration of their transfer over the network, thus accelerating page loading times and reducing Bandwidth consumption .

This add-on also features an integrated add-on with the UpdraftPlus add-on , which enables you to automatically create a backup copy of your site before performing any improvement procedures for your site. It allows you to schedule tasks and set a time to automatically optimize and clean your site every week or every period you specify yourself.

WP Smush.it:

This plugin is one of the most popular image compression plugins in WordPress. This add-on reduces the total size of each image on the site without affecting the quality of this image and supports all popular image formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG)

The add-on is available in a free version with very good features, and it is also available in a paid version that requires a membership in the WPMU DEV platform , the cost of which starts at $15.83 per month. But in exchange for this membership, you will get a wide range of plugins and other useful features that will help you optimize and improve your website significantly.

This plugin processes images on the site, removes all unused colors from images, compresses any image on your site, also removes metadata from JPEG images and can handle more than 50 images at one time.

WordPress AMP Plugin

If your site is slow when browsing on a mobile phone, this free add-on enables you to speed up your site on the phone, as the page acceleration system ( A ccelerated M obile P ages), or what is known for short as AMP, is an open source initiative from Google that aims to improve the browsing experience. Mobile users are on the Internet and deliver super-fast loading speeds for websites viewed on mobile phones.

This plugin can help you create an AMP version of your website without having to make any changes to your existing site. They also allow you to track your AMP page traffic and analyze the behavior of your site visitors.

These were examples of the most important WordPress site acceleration plugins that installing them on your site can significantly improve your site’s results in performance measurement tools, and get you faster loading times for your site’s pages.
Of course, you do not have to install all of these add-ons. You can choose the appropriate add-ons that provide you with the features you want and install only what you need from them.

If you have not succeeded in diagnosing the reasons for your site’s slowness yourself and all your attempts to increase its speed and improve its performance have failed, you can seek the help of specialists who will help you in performing this task. On freelance sites such as and Mustaqil, you will find thousands of people who provide you with this service and undertake the task of examining your site, diagnosing the reasons for its slowness, and working to solve them.

Conclusion

In today’s article, we showed you the importance of speeding up your site, how to accurately judge whether your site is fast or slow, and we explained to you the most important additions to speed up your WordPress site. In the end, we mention that the hosting server has a significant impact on the speed of your website, so take care of choosing strong and fast hosting before you bother with any other procedure.

Remember that your website is your brand identity in the digital world, so having a slow website or online store gives a bad impression of this brand.
In return, a fast website enhances your brand and improves your customers’ confidence in you. So value the time of your visitors and customers and give them a fast website and they will undoubtedly appreciate the content, services and products that you offer them.