When it comes to your website, there are several factors that go into ensuring enhanced user experience – such as the loading speed.
Recent stats show that almost half of us would abandon a website if it took more than two seconds to load.
What does this mean for your website? And why does it matter so much?
Users find it extremely frustrating when a website doesn’t load as quickly as expected; worse, your user retention and conversion will take a major hit. Even worse, Google will list your website lower on its SERPs.
If you have a WordPress-based website, you can make use of the large collection of useful plugins WordPress supports. These plugins can make a significant difference to your site’s performance – and CDN’s can help too.
First, let’s take a look at what a WordPress CDN service is and what it can do for you.
Start With A CDN Service
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) has servers set-up in many locations around the world – these locations are known as Points-of-Presence or PoPs.
CDNs help by retrieving the site’s content from the host server and caching it on the PoPs so your site’s available on more server locations. This helps deliver your content swiftly and efficiently to your visitors no matter where in the world they are from.
It ensures that your website data travels the shortest distance so it loads faster, resulting in increased user satisfaction.
In addition to using a CDN service, you can also install WP plugins to make your website load faster.
Try out the following plugins to help cache and deliver content for a fast loading website.
Install Plugins That Can Speed Up Your Site
Here are our top picks for WordPress plugins that can do wonders for your site speed:
1. W3 Total Cache
Caching allows storage of crucial website data, only to retrieve it quickly when needed. The W3 total cache plugin can help increase the speed of your site by caching data that would otherwise take a lot of time to load.
Here are some of the features of the W3 Total Cache Plugin:
- Minifying code to reduce loading times
- Browser caching
- Database caching
- Object, i.e. image caching
Additionally, you can also integrate it with your WordPress CDN service to decrease loading times. However, its setup can be difficult because of the sheer number of caching options available.
2. WP Rocket
This is a very powerful plugin that offers excellent caching capabilities along with a few other features like lazy loading, database optimization and Google Analytics code hosting for your website.
That’s not all! Here is a comprehensive list of the WP Rocket plugin features:
- Little tweaks to improve performance and speed
- Page caching
- Image lazy loading
- Easy integration with your CDN service
- Database optimization
- Google Analytics integration (load the code directly from your server)
- Minifying JavaScript, HTML and CSS code
- Easy to import and export settings
Some caching plugins require in-depth knowledge to set up, but the WP Rocket plugin has a straightforward and intuitive setup process. The user-friendly interface is also an added advantage of this plugin.
3. WP Fastest Cache
This plugin has the sole purpose of caching data easily and effectively.
Install the plugin, activate it and go through the settings to get started. Save the changes you’ve made to the settings and your website will be ready to load at a moment’s notice.
With the WP fastest cache, you can even set cache expiration times for some URL strings.
WP Fastest Cache has a few distinguishing features, such as:
- Setup is easy
- Minify CSS and HTML Easily
- Integration with your CDN Service
- Set cache expiration times for all your posts and pages
- Clear cache and minified CSS and HTML with a single click
- Exclude some elements and areas from posts and pages that are slowing your website down
- Upgradable to the premium version with more features
This plugin has a massive fan base of more than 200,000 webmasters who are already using it, and glowing reviews on WordPress offer ample credibility to it.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
Images that take way too long to load can harm your website speed leading to a significant reduction in traffic, subscriptions, and customers.
The EWWW image optimizer plugin can easily fit in with your CDN, store images there and optimize them for faster load times. You can even compress those images and achieve faster loading times.
Here are several reasons why the EWWWW Image Optimizer should be in your WordPress arsenal:
- Free backup stores original images for 30 days
- Secure with SSL encryption
- Optimizes every image on a site beyond the media library
- Compresses images by 80% of the original file size
This plugin is easy to set up and can be used with multiple sites.
Conclusion
The right plugins can help you speed up your site’s loading times to drive more traffic, find more customers and generate increased revenue.
Hopefully, you can use some of the plugins mentioned above and integrate them into your WordPress CDN service to create a site that’s geared for better results.
