You have probably heard about the importance of speed on websites. But what exactly does it mean? And how do you optimize your website for speed?
The speed of a website depends on many factors, including running on a good server and most importantly, choosing a plugin with performance features such as caching and CSS/JS optimization.
And for today’s standard, speed isn’t the only factor for SEO algorithms, with the introduction of the Core Web Vitals by Google. Page Experience becomes as much as important as having a website loading fast.
Take a look below for a list of top plugins to improve your website Pagespeed and also fix your Core Web Vitals, the new algorithm from Google. Many of these plugins can be used together to maximize results(check compatibility).
Perfmatters
Perfmatters may be discouraging to use due to its advanced features, but its interface lets beginners remove unnecessary code from running to improve Pagespeed and Core Web Vitals.
Perfmatters “Script Manager” lists all your scripts and allows you to remove them from loading by device type, location, group of users, or using a regex formula.
You can access Perfmatters documentation to make sure what effect each feature will have, and how to fix any issues, if encountered. Perfmatters also offers a “Testing Mode”, which safely previews features before applying them to the live website.
One of the features of Perfmatters is database optimization, offering scheduled automatic database optimization. Perfmatters also have many features focused on Woocommerce. Other Perfmatters features:
- Change your WordPress login URL: change the wp-login URL to avoid hacking or bots.
- Google Analytics locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- Add code to header, body, and footer.
- Preloading: Preload images only necessary, improving Core Web Vitals.
- Defer and delay JavaScript.
- Remove unused CSS: creates a different CSS file with removed unused CSS.
- Google Fonts locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- Multisite support.
- CDN rewrite.
You may fix your Core Web Vitals and Pagespeed using only Perfmatters even for themes like Elementor, if you’re keen to test your page functions and visuals.
Perfmatters 20% OFF Coupon: WPALPHA
Wp Rocket
Leader in the cache performance, it has many new features released to help improve Core Web Vitals, including removing unused CSS and delaying all Javascript but not essential ones by default:
- Delay Javascript until user interaction
- Critical CSS
- Cloudflare integration
- Database Optimization
- HTML/CSS/JS minification & compression
- DNS prefetching, preloading
- Remove unused CSS
- Lazyload
- CDN: Bunny
- For Image Optimization + WebP, consider Imagify $10/month
The yearly pricing on Wp Rocket plans are:
- WP Rocket 1 website license: $59
- WP Rocket 3 websites license: $119
- WP Rocket Unlimited website license: $299
Cloudflare Automatic Platform Optimization
Cloudflare currently offers Automatic Platform Optimizations (APO) for $5/month, and it caches the HTML of your WordPress website. This is possible due to Cloudflare Workers that cache dynamic content.
According to Cloudflare, their Automatic Platform Optimization plugin optimized their client’s Web Vitals and Core Web Vitals metrics:
“Automatic Platform Optimization consistently demonstrated better aggregate performance among sites we analyzed in TTFB, First Paint, FCP, and LCP metrics. Even more impressive are improvements on both desktop and phone form factors.”
- TTFB (Time to First Byte): Improvements of 72%
- FCP (First Contentful Paint): Improvements of 23%
- Speed Index: Improvements of 13%
Cloudflare APO is compatible with WP Rocket* and many other plugins, check the compatibility here.
*Cloudflare APO cache needs to be manually purged on every Wp Rocket change.
Get your WordPress Core Web Vitals optimized and your pages faster!