15 Best WordPress Plugins For A Fast & Responsive Website

Looking for some popular WordPress plugins in the market promise to make your website super-fast and responsive? Well, you’ve come to the right place. However, these plugins won’t be much help if your website isn’t built on a solid foundation.

For that, you need two key things: reliable hosting, and top-notch security. Find the WordPress hosting who offers optimized hosting that features Litespeed caching technology and more. Meanwhile, to ease into reliable security, without breaking the bank, I’d suggest checking out Cloudflare for a free SSL and CDN services.

The catch is if you’re using free web hosting, or unreliable service, the storage, bandwidth, and uptime limitations are going to erase every benefit you might get from a powerful plugin.

A responsive website also slows down the loading time of webpages, enhancing the online experience even more. WordPress Hosting is compatible with hundreds of plugins that help your site to perform optimally.

Why Using a WordPress Caching Plugin is Important?

When your website starts to grow, you will begin having a heavier flow of content, and you will install additional plugins that can slow down the websites significantly.

A WordPress caching plugin will protect your website from slowing down or crashing during spikes of high traffic. Caching is essential for reducing the load on your WordPress hosting servers resulting in improved WordPress speed and performance.

What plugins can I install to improve my WordPress website?

Without further ado, let’s check out the 15 WordPress plugins you should definitely consider for your website:

1. W3 Total Cache

This plugin is free and highly effective at the same time, and it successfully runs on millions of websites. W3 Total Cache stores data from existing requests and uses this data to process subsequent requests much faster.

In short, this plugin leverages features such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve SEO and enhance the user experience by reducing load times.

2. WP-Optimize

This revolutionary plugin lets you clean and optimize your databases, compress your images, and cache pages. For instance, every time you edit your posts, WordPress saves versions of the edits, and in a short time, your database fills up with unnecessary data.

Deleting this obsolete data makes it easy to access the content, with the page loading faster, enhancing the user experience, with a seamless online connection. For just $39 a year, you can get the starter pack (1-2 licenses), Business Pack for $59 (5 product licenses), and the Unlimited Pack for $149.00 for as many product licenses as your online businesses need.

3. WP Super Minify

Boosting your site’s performance is now simple, with this easy-to-install free plugin. Once you activate it, you can easily see the source of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript are now compressed and much smaller. This plugin can significantly improve your site loading speeds.

WP Super Minify plugin is also open source, meaning that other programmers can make improvements or changes to the code for an even better browsing experience.

4. WP Smush.it

Although Smush Pro offers a free version of this optimizing plugin, the premium offer is the complete package. You can enjoy up to 2X compression with super Smush, Enhanced CDN, a backup of all original images, and Bulk Smush to optimize files in bulk.

You have three options to choose from; Smush Pro Only at $5 a month, Performance Package at $7.50 per month, WPMU DEV Membership at $12.50 per month. With such great offers, you can easily optimize huge photos up to 32MB or automatically optimize and resize your graphic content.

5. Perfmatters

This lightweight plugin specifically focuses on reducing the number of HTTP requests your website makes to improve its speed.

Since the first version hit the market in 2017, the creators have made improvements such as accessibility improvements, style fixes, WooCommerce sections, multisite support, and bug fixes. They have also added toggles such as Disable Google Maps and Disable Google Fonts.

The offer includes one year of premium support with updates, starting at $24.95, with support for only one site. On the other hand, the most popular package supports unlimited websites at $124.95 per year.

6. WP Rocket

Over 1.2 million WordPress sites continue to load superfast with the WP Rocket plugin. As one of the best plugins, it is easy to install, simple to use, and affordable too. It adds improved caching capabilities, compression, preloading, and more. The Single Package supports use on one website and costs $49.

The Plus Package supports three websites at $99, and at $249 per year, you can install this plugin on unlimited websites. All these packages come with one year of support and updates, and they boost your site through:

Browser caching
Page caching
Cache preloading
G-Zip compression
Sitemap preloading

7. A3 Lazy Load Tiny PNG

Lazy loading refers to loading content only when it is in view, rather than preloading all content on a page. By doing so, it enhances the speed considerably. This popular plugin has an easy admin panel from where you can define which elements are lazy-loaded or when they are visible in the browser.

In short, as the user scrolls through the web pages, some content such as PNG images only load when they are visible in the viewport. You can easily apply it to post thumbnails, Gravatars, widgets, posts, and pages. You can conveniently turn it on or off from the admin settings.

8. Speed Booster Pack

As the most popular CMS, WordPress, still grows, more websites build on this platform. We recommend the Speed Booster Pack to keep your site healthy and fast. It also clears junk from your WordPress database, so that only important stuff remains, and your site can be more responsive.

It works well in minifying Google Analytics Local Load, inline CSS, and Google Fonts, and it’s free to use.

9. Autoptimize

Autoptimize Pro offers the Autoptimize Expert configuration at €249 and the complete speed Optimization at €699. This plugin scans your site to identify the areas dragging down your site performances and performs optimization on them.

Using Autoptimize gives you a clear picture of how performance changes, before and after optimization, with a comprehensive report. It caches configuration, both on the client and server-side. It also suggests changes to your website setup and recommends quality hosting such as Hostinger.

10. WP Revisions Control

As you do more revisions and store them in the database, they may cause bloat over time, leading to slow queries and a noticeable slower performance. Unlike the previous constant WP_POST_REVISIONS that saved all revisions, this plugin adds functionalities that help you choose the number of post revisions you want to keep.

11. Cloudflare CDN Plugin

This one-click plugin installation optimizes your WordPress to accelerate loading speeds. Also, it protects your site against vulnerabilities such as DDoS attacks and also improves your SEO. Even though there’s a free version that is effective, you get more from add-ons from Cloudflare Pro and Business plans.

Starting from $5 each per month, you can add as many plugins as you need, including image resizing ($10), Load balancing ($5) to prevent interruptions from traffic, and Dedicated SSL Certificate ($5) to help encrypt your site connections.

12. Accelerated Mobile Pages for WordPress

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) free plugin is the next big thing for WordPress users. This plugin was created to have web pages load instantly, with rich content such as animations, graphics, videos, and ads.

The code also works across multiple platforms and devices, making it a handy tool for your WordPress Hosting. Google is known for creating immersive online experiences, and users have something to look forward to in future updates.

13. WP Fastest Cache

It’s a popular comprehensive cache plugin for WordPress. It has all the features you’ll need to power up your website, with over 1 million downloads and almost 50k paid users.

Paid packages include the Bronze Package at $49.99, Silver Package at $125.00, and the Gold Package at $175.00.

14. WP Super Cache

By compressing files, the server spends much less time to load over the network, to save on CPU time and bandwidth. It also serves the next request much faster, especially if the site user is a regular visitor, as it doesn’t have to cache them.

15. Lazy Load by WP Rocket

Lazy loading means that only specific elements load as they are needed, which is what this plugin does. It works on all images in post content, avatars, and thumbnails. Lazy Load also lets you replace YouTube iframes with a preview thumbnail, and with a script weight of less than 10kb, your pages can load much faster.

Concluding

WordPress is known for its rich selection of plugins for taking websites to a whole new level. In this article, we overviewed some of the best options you can get, both paid and free.

Read Also