Everyone is aware today that Google takes into account the loading speed of your site for its positioning. In addition, this point is very important: the Internet user in 2021 not wait. Thus, minimizing the loading time of your site is essential to have a good user experience and a non-penalized positioning.WordPress is almost 60% of the CMS market share. Therefore, we have chosen the most used software so that this article can help as many people as possible.As you should know, there are tons of different plugins designed to improve your site loading speed offered on WordPress. We have selected 4, the most popular or the best in our opinion (and they are all free!).Before starting, it is necessary to know the current loading speed of your site. For this, you can use the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google or pingdom.com and thus determine your loading speed score, both on mobile and computer. If your site is already fast, don’t install plugins unnecessarily, it might even slow it down. If your site has a bad score, however, we strongly urge you to read on 😉So let’s move on to the 4 WordPress modules that will allow you to optimize the loading time of your website.
Autoptimize
The first plug-in is Autoptimize. It downloads and installs very easily, and is one of the easiest to use. It is a plug-in for minifying CSS and JavaScript files. Concretely, the main functionality of the plug-in is to concatenate and group CSS and JS files into a single file. Among the options offered, Autoptimize allows you to optimize the HTML, CSS, or JS code, force the loading of the JS in the header of the page and defer the loading of secondary CSS files.
WP Minify
Wp Minify, just like autoptimize is a minifier. The plug-in compresses your JS, HTML, and CSS files via minify. Therefore, take up less space, and your site will load faster. Be careful before launching the plug-in, however. Indeed, the fact of combining CSS and JS files can sometimes be problematic for the display of your page and it is necessary to carefully analyze which page to apply the plugin to and which pages to exclude from the process.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a module that aims to be the easiest to use on the market “Installation in 3 minutes flat”. Unlike Autoptimize and WP minify, its main functionality is not minification (although it is offered on the module), but caching. It is therefore a caching module, that is to say, that when an Internet user visits your website, This browser will “memorize” the files already downloaded for the next visit. Likewise, this caching can be done on the server-side, and significantly improve the loading speed of your site.
W3 total cache
Finally, we’ll end this list with the popular W3 total cache. It’s also a caching plugin just like WP Rocket. This module is a very complete extension for WordPress. The support is very efficient and the basic installation is relatively simple. However, by configuring additional settings you will see great improvements.We intentionally did not rank these plugins, as it is not possible to say which one works best, as the results vary from site to site. The best way to find your miracle plugin is to test them and compare the results using PageSpeed Insights.
Caution
However, it is worth remembering that these plug-ins may conflict with other plug-ins or with each other. For example, a caching module should always be unique within a site. However, you can combine caching and minification.It’s up to you to find the ideal combo.
