3 WordPress Speed Optimization Plugins That Will Boost Your Core Web Vitals
The speed of a website is often a determining factor in whether or not a user will continue navigating or click out of a site. By ensuring you have snappy loading speeds, you can retain more site visitors and potentially capture more leads. Let's look at the three best WordPress speed optimization plugins for your core web vitals and get your website generating and converting more leads for your business!
1. WP Rocket
Let's face it: you're looking for tools to help improve your website's performance, but you don't want to study for hours just to figure out how to use them. WP Rocket is a powerful solution that helps boost your loading time and optimize your core web vitals while also remaining extremely easy to navigate for users of any level. What sets WP Rocket apart as a WordPress performance plugin is its intuitive, easy-to-use interface.
WP Rocket is a speed optimization plugin that truly does it all. Better yet, it includes features that other plugins often don't, making it an all-in-one solution for most users. WP Rocket's useful features include:
- User-friendly interface
- Speed improvements with minimal tweaking required
- Minify CSS, HTML and JavaScript
- Image lazy loading
- Page caching
- Cache pre-load
- Advanced caching rules
- Database optimization
- CDN integration
- Direct Cloudflare integration
- Google Analytics integration to load the code from your server
- Settings import and export
- Version rollback
- Delay JavaScript execution time
For a full list and description of WP Rocket features, take a look at their website here.
2. NitroPack
More than just a WordPress performance plugin, NitroPack is a complete speed optimization platform to get your website running as quickly and smoothly as possible. The main appeal of NitroPack is that instead of using a variety of plugins and making you manually decide what to optimize (not to mention figuring out how!), NitroPack does it all for you—automatically.
Add it to your website, install the connector plugin, and choose how aggressive you'd like to make the optimizations. And that's it; you're done! NitroPack will optimize your site automatically to improve time to first byte (TTFB), minimize main-thread work, improve your web core vitals, and more.
NitroPack features include:
- Automatic website optimization
- Various content management systems supported, including WordPress
- Global CDN included and configured automatically
- Various caching types
- Automatic image optimization
- Convert images to next-gen formats
- DNS prefetching
- Defer JS loading
- HTML, JS, and CSS minification
- HTML, JS, and CSS compression
NitroPack offers a free plan which can function for small sites or testing purposes and adds a "powered by" badge to your footer. To benefit from the full strength of this plugin, you'll need to purchase a paid plan which removes the badge and offers a wider variety of resources.
3. Perfmatters
Perfmatters is a lightweight WordPress performance plugin that makes it possible to easily disable certain options that aren't necessary for most sites, many of which WordPress has automatically enabled. Disabling those options can significantly speed up the performance, and Perfmatters takes care of it with just the click of a few buttons. This plugin is a highly effective WordPress tool, though it takes a slightly different approach to improve page load times than the majority of plugins out there.
Unneeded HTTP requests are often a major culprit when it comes to slowing down page rendering. Luckily, Perfmatters also allows you to disable those scripts on a per-page basis, meaning you can stop plugins from loading code where it isn't needed.
Perfmatters features include:
- Lightweight plugin
- Heartbeat control
- REST API control
- Supports advanced performance-boosting functionality (such as DNS prefetch and preconnect)
- Disable scripts on a per-page/post basis
- Disable WordPress options that slow down your site
- Works with your existing caching plugin
Check out a complete list and description of the Perfmatters features here.
Final Thoughts
With so many plugins to choose from, and so many technical terms thrown around, some business owners prefer to outsource things like webpage performance optimization so that they can focus on what they do best: run a business.
WEB ROI is a team of web optimization and digital marketing experts equipped with all the skills and knowledge needed to have your website running smoothly and yield results! Contact us today to discuss your website needs with our passionate and experienced crew.
