10 Plugins That Will Speed Up Your WordPress Site

admin | March 27, 2012 | 0 Comments

The age of the Internet is also the age of instant gratification. Make a visitor wait longer than a second or two for your site to load, and you can bet they’ll just click away to something faster. Here are our 10 favorite plugins that will speed up your WordPress site.

WP Smush.it

WP Smush.it reduces the size of your image files and helps improve your site’s performance. Smush.it’s API optimizes JPEG compression, converts certain GIFs to indexed PNGs, and strips the un-used colors from indexed images.

This is a very easy-to-use plugin. For existing images in your Media Library, just click the “Smush.it now!” option to reduce file sizes. New images that you add will automatically run through the Smush.it API – there’s no extra work on your part!

Quick Stats:

Author: alexdunae
Requires: 2.9 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Last Updated: 11/14/2011
Downloads: 180,481
4.5/5 Stars

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache helps to improve your site’s speed by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing download times, and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

When properly configured, W3 Total Cache can improve your overall site performance by at least 10 times, and offers up to 80% bandwidth savings!

Quick Stats:

Author: fredericktownes
Requires: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Last Updated: 8/26/2012
Downloads: 1,003,653
4.5/5 Stars

Parallelize

A typical Internet browser can handle up to 60 HTTP requests at a time. However, only 2-4 simultaneous requests can be handled from the same hostname, and this can significantly slow down load times on your website.

Parallelize works to speed up your site by automatically parallelizing WordPress attachment files (images or any files uploaded with the WordPress media features) across multiple hostnames, thus speeding up your page load times.

Quick Stats:

Author: iLobster & SEO Jerusalem
Requires: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 2.9.2
Last Updated: 12/30/2009
Downloads: 1,918
5/5 Stars

Plugin Organizer

Plugin Organizer speeds up your WordPress site by giving you the ability to change the order that your plugins are loaded and selectively disable plugins by any post type or word.

This is a great plugin for sites that have a large number of plugins, because you can make sure they don’t all load for every page. Plugin Organizer allows you to disable the unneeded plugins for each individual page.

Quick Stats:

Author: foomagoo
Requires: 3.1 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.3.1
Last Updated: 2/9/2010
Downloads: 4,460
5/5 Stars

WP Avoid Slow

WP Avoid Slow speeds up your WordPress site by adding an Expires header. This is important because most first-time visits to a web page require several HTTP requests to load all the parts of the page. An Expires header makes all these parts cacheable, which reduces unnecessary HTTP requests next time you visit the page.

Quick Stats:

Author: Abhishek
Requires: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 2.9.2
Last Updated: 3/28/2010
Downloads: 1,761
3.5/5 Stars

JS & CSS Script Optimizer

JS & CSS Script Optimizer speeds up your site by grouping and packing Java Scripts and CSS, and reducing the number of HTTP requests.

With this plugin, you can combine several scripts into the single file (to minimize HTTP requests), combine all CSS scripts into the single files (with grouping by “media”), exclude scripts that show errors, and more!

Quick Stats:

Author: evgenniy
Requires: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Last Updated: 7/18/2011
Downloads: 10,870
4/5 Stars

Clean Options

Clean Options finds orphaned options (unused options) and allows you to remove them from the wp_options table. This can save you several KBs or MBs, helping to speed up your site load time.

Quick Stats:

Author: Mittineague
Requires: 2.3 or higher
Compatible up to: 2.9.2
Last Updated: 6/27/2010
Downloads: 77,959
4.5/5 Stars

Optimize DB

Optimize DB allows you to optimize the tables of your database, thus reducing their overhead and speeding up your MySQL database – and all with just one click! The plugin works by running an “optimize table” command on your WordPress table and defragmenting them, which in turn reduces the query execution time and physical space on the disk.

Quick Stats:

Author: joostdevalk
Requires: 1.5 or higher
Compatible up to: 2.7.1
Last Updated: 3/9/2009
Downloads: 39,634
4/5 Stars

Digg Protector

We all know that Digg is a great source of website traffic, but a lot of traffic can reduce your website’s load time as more demands are made on the server. Digg Protector adds a “protect” attribute to your HTML image tags. Then, if a visitor arrives at your site from Digg, they’ll be shown the remotely hosted instead of the locally hosted one. This helps to reduce server load on your web pages if your site is “Digged.”

Quick Stats:

Author: fitztrev & hansengel
Requires: 1.5 or higher
Compatible up to: 2.3.1
Last Updated: 12/18/2007
Downloads: 695
3.5/5 Stars

WP HTTP Compression

WP HTTP Compression lets your WordPress site output pages in a compressed gzip format (only in browsers that support compression). This can reduce your page sizes by 60-80% and increase download speeds by 3-4 times!

One important thing you need to know is that you shouldn’t use WP HTTP Compression if you’re already using WP Super Cache or WP Cache. If you do, your blog will continue to function properly, but the those plugins will stop caching new pages.