WordPress is now-a-days considered to be the most favorite blogging platform among millions. And one of the main reasons for this is its huge directory of free and paid plugins. Any plugin you can name of, is available in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Few days back I wrote an article on speeding up WordPress. It was a complete guide with 15 ways to speed up your WordPress blog with ease.
In this article, I am gonna gift you with 15 hand-picked plugins that can speed up any WordPress site. Any WordPress Cache Plugin you can name of, is here. I have not just made a simple list of plugins as you will find many similar article’s in the Web already well written. Rather I have personally tested each and every plugin, and discussed with you the pros and cons of these plugins. These are the most effective, efficient and hand-picked WordPress performance plugin list ever available on the Internet.
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- Lazy Load Plugin : Improve Website Speed In Seconds
- 15 Ways to Speed Up WordPress And Reduce Page Load Time
- Blogger vs WordPress : Which One to Choose ?
1) W3 Total Cache
Pros: This is a great plugin, used my the most popular blogs in the Web like Mashable, Smashing Magazine, etc. It can boost up your Wordpress performance by more than 10 times. It serves as a complete package to speed up your WordPress blog. It offers seamless integration with any CDN you use to optmize your blog, minifies and caches CSS, HTML, JS with ease, saves more than 80% of your valuable bandwidth, ensure’s stable blog performance even during high traffic spikes.
daPazze uses W2 Total Cache and personally recommends you to use this WordPress Cache plugin to boost your blog’s speed and performance.
Cons: The only problem that most user’s face with this plugin is to control it’s admin panel. The admin panel of this plugin can be quite confusing to many beginner’s and even to many experienced bloggers. This is the only reason an user refuses to use this plugin. But if you dont understand anything. leave the settings on it’s own. It works fine in its default settings.
2) Quick Cache
Pros: It is a very efficient WordPress Cache plugin, that mainly interests beginner’s and very new blogger’s. It does every caching operation’s with ease from a very simple admin panel. Each and every option is self-explanatory and every user will understand what each option or feature actually does.
Cons: Can’t think of any.
3) WP Simple Cache
Pros: As the name suggests, it is a very simple to use caching plugin for your WordPress blog. It work’s great in speeding up your WordPress site through it’s very simple and explanatory admin panel. It offer’s you some of the most basic and fundamental functions you need to speed up WordPress.
Cons: The developer website of this plugin is in Turkish. So don’t expect any documentation from there if you are not Turkish. There aren’t too many options to tweak, so can be quite disappointing to you if you are an advanced blogger.
4) WP Super Cache
Pros: This WordPress plugin is a very popular plugin in terms of speed and performance boost. It works even better during very high traffic spike and even more if you are using a poor Web Host. So definitely go for this plugin if you are on a shared server and often get huge visitor increase in a small span of time.
Cons: Cant think of any.
5) WP-Optimize
Pros: It is a great Database cleanup and optimization tool. It can clean up your database by removing unnecessary items like post revisions, comments in spam, un-approved comments within a few clicks. I personally use this plugin, it it works fairly well.
Cons: Sometimes, you may need to keep your post revisions, for further reference while re-editing your posts. And deleting these items doesn’t clean up much of your database.
6) DB Cache Reloaded
Pros: If you really want to install a Database Caching plugin, then you can go for this one. It is quite better than is predecessor.
Cons: It is a quite newer plugin out there in the market, and has not been tested by many.
7) Hyper Cache
Pros: This plugin is an awesome WordPress cache plugin, which is mainly liked my its users because of its superb mobile device support. Your site will just open up in a blink of an eye in any mobile device. It is also well preferred by its highly satisfied user base because of the its frequent updates and highly supportive developers.
Cons: It is a no-complaint WordPress Speed Up Plugin, and its developer encourage it’s users to report to him any bugs or problems of the plugin by email.
8) WP Smush.it
Pros: This is a must have plugin for each and every WordPress blog. This plugin compresses all images that you upload to your blog without any loss in quality. It can compress any image upto 60% depending upon its resolution, color depth, etc. Just install this plugin and forget everything. It will run each and every image through Smush.it and losslessly compress it for you.
Cons: I cant think of any reason not to use this plugin for your blog. Rather I recommend each and every WordPress user to install this plugin and see the difference in your blog’s loading speed immediately. It is an amazing WordPress Performance plugin that can optimize every single image with utmost efficiency.
9) WP Minify
Pros: Does a simple job of minifying the HTML, CSS and JS files on your server with ease. It reduces the size of your style and script files by removing the unnecessary tabs, spaces and line breaks.
Cons: Dont consider to install a plugin for just a single feature, as there are many other plugins mentioned above that does this same job along with many others.
10) Performance Optimization: Order Styles and Javascript
Pros: This is a simple plugin but does a great job. In WordPress you generally install many plugins and each plugin adds more and more Style and Script files in header. With this plugin you can set the order in which you want each Style and Script to load.
Tip: Always add the CSS Styles at the top of the header as they need to be called first, and the JS files at the bottom as they need to be called at last. This simple technique can help you speed up WordPress in its first load by using this caching plugin.
Cons: I dont think there is any.
11) WP Parallel Loading System
Pros: This is also a simple plugin, and I recommend every one to try this one out. This can seriously contribute to boost your WordPress performance. The Standard HTTP v1.1 allows only 2 requests at a same time from a same domain. But this plugin will create many connections through virtualization. It will create various sub domains of your domain and make connections through them. Thereby drastically speeding up your WordPress blog.
Cons: Few users had problem configuring and running this plugin because their web hosts didn’t support it. But I personally use this plugin and recommend you to use it too.
12) HTML Compress
Pros: It justs compresses the HTML files by removing the white spaces, tabs and page breaks.
Cons: Only a few hundres download’s in the WordPress Plugin Directory prove why people dont use it. There are various other plugin to do this simple job. So why need it?
13) CloudFlare
Pros: If you are using CloudFlare CDN, then definitely install this plugin. CloudFlare acts as a reverse proxy and you see false IPs of your visitors and not their real IPs in your Analytics program. But if you install this plugin then your problem is solved. CloudFlare will now show you the real originating IP addresses of your visitors. It will also show the real IP address of your commentors and will ensue better protection against spam as the spammer’s IP is immediately reported to CloudFlare system.
Cons: Nothing at all.
14) External Files Optimizer
Pros: It is a very simple WordPress Cache Plugin , that does nothing extraordinary. It simply compresses the HTML, CSS and JS files that are generated by various plugins that you install.
Cons: It does it’s job fairly well, but I don’t see any reason to install this as there are other plugins that do the same odd job.
15) Plugin Organizer
Pros: If you are an WordPress plugin addict then this one is just for you. Using too many plugins can reduce page load time, but with this plugin you can change the order in which each plugin will be loaded. There are some plugin’s that you want to be loaded first as they perform more important tasks than others. You can also selectively disable any plugin that you dont want to be loaded in any post or page.
Cons: Not any. It does its work in the best possible way.
I have tried to present every possible information in the most interactive way. I myself have tested all of them in my blog, and am currently using many of them in daPazze. I hope you will not have any problem in finding the best WordPress Cache Plugins so as to speed up your own WordPress blog. Share your experience with these plugins here, we would love to hear from you your stories and what plugin’s are you using in your own blog to speed it up.
