Plugins to improve the WPO of your website

Having a website that loads fast is a must nowadays. Basically, it is important for SEO and to increase the retention rate of visitors; if a site takes a long time to load, visitors tend to leave to look for another site.

But how do you make a page load fast? There are many things you can do, in another post we have made a complete guide to WPO for WordPress, but in this article we wanted to focus on making a selection of the best plugins to improve the WPO of your WordPress.

What are the best plugins to improve the WPO of a website?

First of all, WPO stands for Web Perfomance Optimization, which translates to Web Performance Optimization.

That being understood, plugins to improve WPO are all those that in one way or another help to improve the loading of the site; either by optimizing images, improving the coding or removing unnecessary elements.

However, it is very important to mention that in addition to installing plugins to improve WPO, you should also do your own optimization, removing any unnecessary add-ons and removing excess images from the main pages.

These aspects are vital for services such as web auditing and have an impact on search engine positioning.

Once you are done with making these changes, then you can proceed to use one of these plugins to improve WPO:

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a paid add-on considered by many SEO experts as one of the best plugins to improve the loading speed of a website, without having to do much.

What this plugin does is to optimize the cache of the website, making it work better, which translates into a considerable improvement of the loading speed.

Among the most outstanding features of this plugin to improve loading speed are the following:

• Compress files for faster loading.
• Incorporates caching to improve loading speed for repeat visitors.
• Improves loading speed for search engines (this way, Google crawlers feel that the site loads much faster than it actually does).

Swift Performance Lite

This plugin is free unlike the previous one, and has positioned itself as one of the best free plugins to improve WPO.

It is arguably the best free option to WP Rocket, as it also focuses on incorporating cache to your website; which helps to considerably improve its loading speed.

This add-on also has a paid version that incorporates more options, in case you need other variables to further optimize the loading speed of your website.

3. LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is another free plugin that has 5 stars in the WordPress repository. This add-on is similar to the previous ones in that it incorporates caching options to your website, so that it loads better.

But, that’s not all this plugin has to offer, as it also has the following options:

• Image optimizer.
• Asynchronous CCS/JS loading.
• Multi-site support.
• Database optimizer.

4. Imsanity

This plugin is also free and incorporates several options to optimize the images on your website.

Basically, if you have a lot of large and heavy images; then you have a serious problem, as these images greatly affect the loading speed of any website.

To solve this problem, with Imsanity you can make a modification of all the images on your website, allowing you:

• Edit the size of all uploaded images (or only those that meet certain characteristics).
• Compress images to make them lighter, without affecting image quality.

5. Autoptimize

Heavier scripts can affect the loading of your website, so a great way to combat this problem is to use Autoptimize, a completely free plugin, which compresses and improves the loading of HTML, CCS and JavaScript files.

It is important to keep in mind that you have to read the instructions of this plugin before using it, otherwise, you may end up affecting the look of your website by making some things load badly or simply not load at all.

6. WP Optimize

Every time a revision is made to an article uploaded to WordPress, a copy of the entire article is saved in the database; which in the long run, can overload it.

But this does not only happen with the revision of articles, as it also happens with other situations in WordPress.

For all this, it is necessary to perform a maintenance of the databases from time to time and with this plugin to improve the free WPO, you can do it. It is not automatic, but you only need to use it once a month to have clean databases.

Important things to consider when using plugins to improve the WPO of a WordPress website

The first thing you should consider is that these plugins to improve WPO are made to give small improvements; which are often noticeable to the naked eye, but not always.

On the other hand, you should not think that by installing all these plugins the loading speed of your site will improve; you should evaluate, which add-ons will really improve the performance of your websiteIf you only install plugins for the sake of installing them, sooner rather than later you will realize that this is far from being positive, it is counterproductive, even worsening the loading speed of your website.

In addition to this, it is recommended that before installing any plugin to improve the WPO, it is important that you make a backup, so if something goes wrong, you can easily restore your website to a previous version.

Using a quality plugin that really improves the loading speed of your website can make the difference between being in the first position or in the third. So, choose from our list above the ones that suit you best and start taking advantage of them.

If you need more information about them, in our SEO agency in Barcelona we tell you which of them are our favorites and those that have proven to offer the best performance.