WordPress happens to be one of the slickest and fastest Web CMSs out there. Once installed it generally works really quick out of the box when you start it for the first time, but that joy doesn’t last for a long time. As you keep adding more content and keep getting more traffic you must have observed a gradual decline in page loading performance. There are many performance enhancement options available for WordPress, we are going to review a few of them here:

CDN Enabler Plugin

Delivering static content (JS/CSS/JPG/GIF/PNG/Fonts) from your standard web-server (in most cases Apache 2 Web Server) generally leads to higher server loads as well as degraded pageperformance. For this reason, using a CDN or a Content Delivery Network is recommended.

Fast Velocity Minify Plugin:

Minification is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code without changing its functionality. Minified JS and CSS files reduce file sizes and improve page loading performance. With Fast Velocity Plugin you can easily minify front-end JS and CSS and even combine them to reduce HTTP requests and improve page loading performance.

WP Fastest Cache Plugin:

Most WordPress based blogs do not have rapid updates on their pages, while default behaviour of WordPress mandates running PHP Scripts, running SQL Queries and rendering even unchanged blog pages every-time a new request is hit. This generally has a performance impact. A way of solving this is to cache these not-so-frequently updated pages which bypass running PHP scripts and SQL queries, thereby speeding up page loading. WP Fastest Cache is a simple to use WordPress caching plugin with lots of features and is recommended for speeding up WordPress sites.

W3 Total Cache Plugin:

W3 Total Cache is another caching plugin with more options and configurability but is harder to use and make websites stable.

Smush Image Compression and Optimisation Plugin:

WP-SmushIt is an image compression plugin which helps compress images uploaded in WordPress media library. Compressed images improve page loading performance and speed up websites.