WordPress is a great platform but it can be slow and difficult to use. Thankfully, you will learn about the three best WordPress speed plugins on the marketplace.

1) WP Rocket – best caching plugin for speeding up WordPress websites (cache, preload, CSS, and JS optimization).

2) Perfmatters – best CSS/JS minimizer plugin for reducing the size of CSS and JS files and serving google fonts locally (disabling unused CSS and JS).

3) ShortPixel – best image compression plugin for compressing images without any quality loss and producing webp/avif formats that provide optimal speed on-site loading.

Now let’s take a deeper look into each of these plugins and how exactly they will help you.

WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugin for WordPress

WP Rocket is the best caching plugin for speeding up WordPress websites (cache, preload, CSS, and JS optimization). WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that allows you to create on-demand static versions of your dynamic pages without any source code changes. This means no more waiting time as the content will be served from cache instead of dynamically generated via PHP. This best caching plugin is available at a price of $59 per site, the best value you can get for your money when it comes to WordPress speed optimization. The best thing is that WP Rocket will optimize your WordPress website without any quality loss as static files are compressed and minified with no compromise on source code quality. All changes made to any CSS or JS are quickly and easily reverted.

WP Rocket is continually improving their product, they recently launched a beta program that will optimize CSS delivery on WordPress by scanning the site and automatically removing unused CSS. I will say that this feature is still in beta and I have not had a successful deployment of it yet, but I test it on every WordPress website we optimize.

Another great new feature that WP Rocket offers is Delay JavaScript until user interaction. This is a MAJOR load time improver. I will warn you that depending on the WordPress plugins and theme that you use, you may face some unpleasant user experience. (Specifically, Slider Revolution or any other JavaScript-powered slider will not load anything until the user scrolls on your page.)

Finally, if you are wondering how to optimize CSS delivery in WordPress, look no further than WP Rocket. This premium plugin is the best at optimizing CSS delivery to ensure that your website has minimal critical chain issues and your First Contentful Paint is very fast.

Perfmatters is the best Wordpress speed plugin to disable CSS and JS that goes unused page by page

WordPress is an open-source development platform and because of that, any developer can create themes and plugins for use with WordPress. This means that there are plugins and themes that can be poorly optimized.

What does it mean when a Wordpress plugin or theme is poorly optimized?

If a plugin or a theme is poorly optimized, it means that its code runs on every single page or post on your WordPress website. Even if the plugin is not needed on the page or post. This adds unnecessary overhead in CSS and JS requests and is one of the reasons your WordPress website is slow.

The best way to optimize your WordPress website is to disable any CSS and JS that goes unused page by page. For example, Google Maps integration on your contact page. It almost always has Google Maps external calls happening on every page including the Contact page. That is a major contributor to a slower website.

Perfmatters is another one of the best plugins to speed up WordPress because it allows you to disable any unused CSS or JS files site-wide or on each individual page.

I have been using this best WordPress speed plugin for years now and I have disabled CSS and JS from hundreds of websites. This plugin is also continually developing great improvements.

A couple of the newer features include a way to disable CSS or JS files for Mobile only, but leave it for Desktop. This is HUGE for WordPress speed optimization because many themes have extra bloat for mobile browsing.

The next new feature that’s worth mentioning is the ability to serve your Google Fonts locally on your web server. This eliminates an external call to Google to load the fonts on your website and also helps to remove any flash of unformatted text.

ShortPixel is a great image optimizer plugin

When it comes to WordPress speed optimization, image compression is a HUGE component. The best way to compress your images for excellent website speed on desktop and mobile is to use a premium plugin called ShortPixel.

The best thing about a WordPress plugin like ShortPixel versus an external image compression service like TinyPNG or Kraken is that you do not need to be a developer to integrate ShortPixel into your WordPress site. Its best feature is automatic image compression of all the images on your website, no matter how many or where they are located.

ShortPixel also offers best-in-class image compression by generating both webp and avif image formats.

Webp is a relatively new image format that Google recommends over png or jpg images. Webp files are significantly smaller, without any quality loss.

The best thing about webp is that they are supported by almost every browser and device platform in the world.  

Avif image formats are even newer than webp and are 4 times more compressed than webp.

Now if you don’t know what all of this means and you want to optimize your website for the best WordPress speed, then look no further than Bauertech. Our services have been proven over and over again. Contact us to learn more.

Have you tried any of the best WordPress plugins we recommend? We’d love to hear your best optimization story in the comments below. Thanks for reading and sharing if you found this article useful. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them

Bonus Tips For Wordpress Speed Optimization

Some best practices that most WordPress speed optimization experts will tell you to do are:

• Enabling Gzip compression
• Use a CDN
• Host your website on a dedicated server versus a shared host.

For the best results though, I recommend going with the best WordPress plugins mentioned above in addition to following these best practices.

If you have any plugins you have used to speed up WordPress or optimize CSS delivery, please share in the comments below. Thanks for reading and sharing! If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them below.