As a blog owner, I’m sure you know that the faster your blog is, the happier your visitors will be. Time is more precious now than ever before and most people definitely have less of it (than ever before); so you want to be sure that your blog is optimized for maximum performance.
The best way to do this is through the use of plugins. Since there are so many to choose from, I’ve narrowed the list down to 9 amazing plugins that will help you optimize your blog and increase the load time of your pages. In most cases, you can get away with using just 1 or 2 of these – since plugins also contribute to slow loading times. So let’s take a look at these 9 plugins and see just what they can do to help make your blog faster and your readers happier.
Parallelize
means to “adapt (a program) to be suitable for running on a parallel processing system.” This plugin helps you do that by paralyzing resources across multiple hostnames. Doing this helps to speed up the load time of your blog pages. This plugin will automatically parallelize your all of your blog attachment files to help speed up your pages. We used it on our psd to html blog and it worked like a charm!
This plugin “implements object level persistent caching and can be used instead of the built in WordPress WP_Object_Cache.” Unlike other caching plugins, this one does not cache your entire pages, it only caches the data specified within the plugin’s API functions. In other words, it will noticeably reduce the load of your databases, hence speeding up page loads and increasing the overall performance of your blog.
Quick Cache takes real-time snapshots of everything on your blog from pages to posts to categories and then stores them for later referencing. This helps to save time when your pages are loading. You can use the settings to configure how these cached pages should be used, in order to optimize your blog’s performance. “By default, Quick Cache does not serve cached pages to users who are logged in, or to uses who have left comments recently.”
This is another great plugin for caching everything on your blog, reducing load times, and improving the performance of your server. It promises “at least 10x improvement in overall site performance when fully configured.” If you can understand all of the settings, you’re sure to to save up to 80% on your bandwidth as well. This huge improvement will also help to improve blog’s rank on Google, which is a huge plus! There’s also a very thorough setup guide available for those who need help.
Minification is the “process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality.” With that being said, this plugin will combine and compact your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, which helps to increase the load time of your pages. It’s also great for finding and removing duplicate sources in your code. In the settings you can specify files that you don’t want minified and also set the cache expiration time.
WP Smush.it works with your images by reducing their size, stripping meta data, optimizing compression, converting to indexed versions and stripping unused colors for indexed images. It may sound like the plugin is ruining your images, but it’s not. These are actually recommended methods of optimizing images in lossless ways. The plugin works automatically and requires no work on your end; just install, activate and go on as you were.
WP Super Cache is “a very fast engine for WordPress that produces static HTML files.” After this file is created, it will show this instead of processing your WordPress PHP scripts (which slows down the loading of your blog). It will only shows these files to users of your blog who are not logged in, haven’t left a comment, or haven’t viewed a password protected post. In other words, the majority of your users will be served with these super fast static HTML files when loading your blog.
If you’re using a low resource hosting for your blog, this plugin is for you. Hyper Cache is kind of like PC optimization software, but for your blog. It’s is easier to configure than the more complex cache plugins like W3 Total Cache (mentioned above). Not only does it cache your pages for faster loading, but it even auto-cleans your system to help reduce disk usage and compresses your storage.
Lastly we have CDN Tools, which is designed to “drastically speed up your blog’s load time by loading data onto a content distribution network” (also known as content delivery network). Your JavaScript and media files will all be loaded on an external server via Cloud Files, which helps to free up and speed up your own server. You really can’t beat a free additional server for your files, plus setup process is pretty simple.
With speed optimization out of the way, you can focus on other things like search engine optimization and social media campaigns.
