You already know WordPress is an awesome tool and you can do a lot in no-time. With the REST API, the Theme Customizer API, the huge community and the great designs available for free or paid, WordPress has simply earned the trust of a lot of publishers and webmasters (29% of the web uses WordPress). You can find an open source or a professional plugin that covers almost any need in terms of sites features. And even if you don’t find such a plugin that will match 100% your requirements, as long as you have a clear understanding of what you are trying to achieve, you can get one plugin build by a PHP development company really fast, just because WordPress is so well documented.
But installing & uninstalling plugins, generating content, using visual builders or managing an e-shop using Woocommerce (maybe), will make your site load slower – in time. This is where you’d need enough data base knowledge to work directly on your tables. Or you just need to know the right tools that will help you clean up & speed up your site.
Below are few suggestions that will get you going in the area of improving performance for your WordPress based website:
4 WordPress performance plugins
1. WP-Sweep – a plugin developed by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan with over 60,000+ active installations that will help you clean up your data base. Removing revisions, auto drafts, orphaned or duplicate post meta, orphaned or duplicate term meta or transient options can be done with just a few clicks. Really useful for sites that haven’t been cleaned up in a while (or ever). This plugin is free to use.
2. Smush Image Compression – with over 1 million active installs, this plugin will resize and optimize images once they are uploaded into your media library. If you already have uploaded quite a lot of images and would like to compress those too, you can either do that in bulks of 50 items or you can get the premium version where you’ll have a lot more options. This plugin is really useful for sites with multiple authors, where the risks of them not properly resizing and saving images for web is high. You’d also want to have this plugin installed if you care about the speed of your site and the Google Page Speed Test Tool score.
3. Scalability Pro – is a premium plugin (build by the guys from WP Intense) that will help your WordPress site load a lot faster. Works excellent especially if you’re handling a bigger Woocommerce shop, but you can go a lot with it even for smaller sites. Scalability Pro complements caching systems perfectly, while adding 13 indexes to your key WordPress tables. The developers of this plugin suggest fixing all hosting issues before actually buying their product, but I can strongly recommend using it even if the hosting works like a charm.
4. W3 Total Cache – is a performance plugin with over 1 million installs. Some argue that WP Super Cache (over 1 million active installs), Autoptimize (over 500.000 active installs) or WP Fastest Cache (over 500.000 active installs) are better or with a lower footprint, but I found that I have better control with W3 Total Cache over what I actually want to cache and how. The fact that you can integrate with a CDN is also a big plus. I was able to get really good results with it (tested with Google PageSpeed Insights & Pingdom). CSS, HTML and JS compression available, as well.
Hosting is important
Using the 4 plugins listed above will help you manage your WordPress installation with ease, keeping the site clean and making it load fast. If you’re running a Woocommerce store, using the same pack of modules will surely provide a performance boost to your platform. But don’t forget that using the right hosting provider means a great deal when working with big databases or high traffic sites. Some hosting companies actually provide additional tools for server caching or different server modules like PageSpeed Module (available for Apache & Nginx). If you’re running your own server (dedicated server or just a VPS), then you can control most of what’s installed there, so there is a good starting point for improved performance for your site.
General conclusions
Before trying out any of the above plugins, make sure that you’ve deactivated and deleted plugins that you no longer use. It’s a good thing to also analyze your theme and the way it loads resources (some themes are loading JS files you don’t really need) and have your WordPress version up to date. Cleaning first, caching second.
