Brief History of WordPress! WordPress is the most popular blogging tool and dynamic content management system based on PHP and MYSQL and we as blogger love it. WordPress was first released in 2003 and these days more than 20% of all websites that are created are based on WordPress CMS.
By December 2011, WordPress 3.0 version was downloaded 65 million times. Now you can make predictions about WordPress popularity.
There are lots of ready to use features like themes, plugins, widgets, multi user and multi blogging facility and mobile compatibility etc., which makes it the true leader in dynamic content management system.
WordPress Plugins Beneficial for Improved Performance
We as blog owner can add any kind of functionality to our WordPress blogs and also can improve their speed with the help of plugins. Since website speed becomes a ranking rankings factor on search engine, we always look at ways to speed up our WordPress blogs so that are able to bring maximum traffic to our blog from search engines.
WordPress Plugins Directory has many plugins that are specially designed for improving the load time of a WordPress blog. Today I’m going to share 5 WordPress plugins that you can use on your blog to experience faster loading WordPress blog. I would not suggest you install all of these plugins into your WordPress blog; you should install those only, which you really need.
After speeding up your WordPress blog, you will not only enjoy better search engine rankings but will also be able to engage your blog readers for longer period of time.
WP Super Cache Plugin
WP Super Cache is the ultimate caching plugin for WordPress blogs. WP Super Cache plugin after installation will start converting dynamic page of your WordPress blog into static HTML and will start processing these HTML pages to your blog readers.
This way your sever will not need to process those heaving and expensive PHP files. Click this link to know more in details about WP Super Cache Plugin and its benefits.
WP Smush.it Plugin
WP Smush.it Plugin will help in reducing the size of images that are used in your blog posts and pages etc. WP Smush.it plugin used to run in the background and it automatically reduce the size of every image which is uploaded into your WordPress blog.
This plugin also gives that Bulk Smush.it facility that we can use to reduce size of large number of images in one go. Check this link to know more in detail about WP Smush.it installation and its benefits.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another page caching plugin for WordPress blogs. W3 Total Cache plugin is also used by lots of popular blogs in the industry including Mashable, Tech Crunch, Personified, BlogPreneurs.
W3 Total Cache is recommended as best caching plugin by some web hosts in the industry including MediaTemple, HostGator, Page.ly and WP Engine. Click here to know more in detail about W3 Total Cache Plugin and its features etc.
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
Plugin Performance Profiler plugin will scan all of your active plugins and will give a breakdown showing much long these plugin actually take to load. Once this plugin scans all of your active WordPress plugins, you should have look at its plugins load time breakup report.
Now you need to delete or deactivate those plugins that you more need. If you are seeing some plugins in the report that you cannot live without and are taking lots of time in loading, look out for better alternative to those plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.
Below I’m sharing a screenshot showing Plugin Performance Profiler Scanned Report After deactivating the Broken Link Checker Plugin:
When I run p3 plugin on Bloggers Passion, I came to know Broken Link Checker Plugin was taking too much time in loading. But this is the plugin I cannot completely ignore. So what I’m going to do is deactivate this plugin for now and activate it once in a month time to fix all the broken links on my blog. Click here to know more in detail about P3 plugin installation process and its benefits etc.
JS & CSS Script Optimizer Plugin
JS & CSS Optimizer Plugin will speed up your WordPress blog be grouping your CSS and Java Script files and thus will lower down the number of HTTP requests that are sent to your server. This plugin will combine all CSS into one single file and several JS scripts into single file. Click this link to download the latest version of this plugin from WordPress plugins directory.
So now you have two caching plugin to choose from for your blog. You can give a try to either of them and stick with the one which gives you desired results. It would be great if you could share your experience about these caching plugins and how much they actually helped in speeding up your WordPress blog.
I would also love to hear your thoughts about Plugin Performance Profiler and the kind of actions you took after going through its load time report for active plugins on your blog in the comments section below.
Awesome thanks! I’ve previously used Minify java/CSS which is also good one!
Thanks for the nice words, Justin.
Minify is another good plugin to improve the loading speed.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you around, again.
Batcache is also good for websites where you don’t need very aggressive caching. Anyway, in my opinion, nothing can replace a good WordPress hosting.
Hey Mariano,
Hearing first time about Batcache, seems like a good option for small WordPress websites. Thanks for stopping by, Miguel.
Enjoy your rest of the weekend.
You’re welcome, Devesh. Batcache is indeed a good option for small sites, and sites with lot’s of URL’s (WordPress.com uses Batcache) because it only stores high-traffic pages instead of caching the long tail.
By the way, I just wrote an article about WordPress Caching that can complement this article.
Have a nice week!
Thanks for coming over here and explaining how Batcache works. I will make sure to give Batcache a try.
By the way, I just tweeted your latest post. Keep up the good work, mate.
I stopped using Smush.it for 2 weeks now because of the server issues in Yahoo. If you upgraded to the latest version I believe the developer made some changes so that it does not optimize the image when it times out.
Hey Marck,
Thanks for coming over here and sharing this useful info with us. Much appreciated.
WP-Smush.it seems to go in and out of ‘working’ properly quite a bit over time.
I also noticed that it adds a lot to page load speed.
For both those reasons I keep it Disabled when not uploading images.
Great list! Thanks for sharing these. I have been wanting to check if my Subscriber2 plug-in is still working properly.
I am using the W3 Total Cache plugin extensively on my blog. The P3 plugin sound promising and I really consider giving it a shot.
Thanks Anil for this write-up.
Both are fantastic plugins, Prasenjit. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
Hope to see you around, again.
this is too much for a beginner like me but thank you for sharing.
I’ve been using W3 Total Cache – and it is a pain to setup at first. But after you set it up it has helped the load time of my site tremendously.
I like the idea of Smush.it – but I already do my best to optimize images. If it created CSS Sprites instead for faster loading I would probably give it a try!
Thanks for a great article.
Last thing though – I wouldn’t want to load ALL of these plugins on my site at the same time would I? (I know – the answer is no but some folks wouldn’t know this!)
Hi Jason,
W3 Total Cache is the plugin that every WordPress user needs to install. I’ve been using it for a year and half now and never had any issues. There are a number of good tutorials available online, that will help you to set up the W3 Total Cache Plugin.
Smush.it is another must have plugin for blogs that shows a ton of images. I’m using it here on this blog and it works very well.
You can load all the plugins at the same time and it won’t effect your site, as all these plugins will only going to help you to improve the performance and speed of your blog.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving a nice comment. Hope you had a great day, Jason.