Speed optimisation for your website is essential for your business. By decrease your website payloads and increasing speed performance, you also improve your website’s visibility on search engines. As a result, your website will begin to experience an increase in targeted organic traffic.

Your page speed also affects the ever increasing amount of mobile users visiting your site. Mobile internet speeds are not as fast as international broadband. They also have a limited amount of data consumption per month. Keeping your website lean will help your mobile visitors find what they need fast, giving you a better chance at getting a conversion.
If your site is built with WordPress, the popular content management system, you can optimise your website’s speed without getting your hands dirty with any code.

There are a few important things that you need to know about speed optimisation with WordPress.
Wordpress allows site owners to expand their website with plugins. Plugins are add-ons that extend the original platform, providing a solution for people who aren’t developers to provide their users with helpful functionality.

Plugins

There are thousands of different plugins that cover many aspects of speed optimisation for website owners. Trying to find the right ones through the many various plugins may seem overwhelming, so we have compiled a list the most popular and comprehensive.

W3 Super Cache
This plugin is impressive because it creates a fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static pages. Static files reduce the wait time for your server to communicate with the user. It also includes many various tools such as minification and browser caching.

Quick Cache
Quick Cache works just as it sounds. It provides your website with reliable caching for WordPress fast. The plugin takes a snap shot of all of your pages, posts, categories, and it stores them so they can be referenced later when needed. This decreases the processing time needed to access pages and as a direct result improves the speed of your website.

WP-Optimize

This plugin allows you to clean up your WordPress database and optimise it through a simple and easy to use interface. You can easily remove common unused data entries such as post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments and comments that are in the trash with just a few clicks. This plugin is a must have in order to keep your website lean and clean.

Tools

There are many tools available to help your analyse your websites speed, and choosing the right ones can also be difficult. These are our favourite essential tools we use for our websites.

Google Pagespeed Insights

Although this is not a plugin and not exclusive to WordPress, it’s an essential tool to identify and analyse speed bottlenecks and improvements. Google Pagespeed Insights analyses the payloads of your webpages, then generates suggestions that will give you a starting point for how you can improve the speed of your website.

Pingdom Tools

This is not a WordPress plugin either. It’s a favourite speed optimisation tool that’s completely free to use. Like Google Pagespeed Insights, this tool analyses a pages performance and payloads. This gives you a list of speed bottlenecks and recommendations to help make your website faster.

Implementing the right WordPress plugins and analysing them will be the foundation of your page speed optimisation for your WordPress site. You can easily provide your users with fast and lean web pages, as well as helping yourself beat the competition in the search engines.