WordPress plugins and perfect performance… it’s a never-ending story.
Some people even claim that there simply are no WordPress websites that have good page speed.
We have compiled a list of different site speed plugins for WordPress in this article. With this list, you can easily compare, make an informed decision when choosing a plugin that suits your needs.
At the end of the article, you’ll also learn why a good performance plugin is only half the battle and what really matters for fast WordPress sites.
A performance plugin for WordPress makes the page load faster – just as the name would suggest.
So far, so good.
But the method to help speed up a website is not always the same. There are different caching plugins, plugins for images compression, and plugins that enable lazy load.
There are multiple ways to increase the loading speed of a WordPress site.
The best page speed plugin for WordPress combines as many of these options as possible into one solution.
This is where two page speed plugins for WordPress particularly stand out:
WP Rocket – unlike numerous other performance plugins – is only available in a paid version.
For your money, WP Rocket offers everything you’d expect from a plugin to speed up your WordPress website. The features range from caching, to minimizing your CSS and JavaScript files, to lazy load for media files.
The prices for WP Rocket are as follows:
- 49$ for one year of support and 1 website
- 99$ for one year of support and 3 websites
- 249$ for one year of support and unlimited websites
If you’re managing more than 7 websites, the biggest license is definitely the best choice.
For a small additional monthly fee of $7.99, you can use WP Rocket’s in-house Content Delivery Network (CDN). However, this is only really relevant if your website is used globally or in big countries.
Websites that are made for a very small area don’t really need a CDN.
This WP page speed plugin is particularly popular because of its easy setup. Usually, setting up a caching plugin without messing up your website’s layout can be somewhat of a technical challenge.
WP Rocket is hard to beat in this aspect – and it also has great support. It also works flawlessly with most popular page builders, such as Divi or Elementor.
Once purchased and uploaded to WordPress, the plugin takes care of speeding up your website almost by itself. Well, except for clicking a few buttons.
Autoptimize is a free WordPress plugin that can help you optimize load times on multiple levels.
Unlike WP Rocket, Autoptimize is more specialized in optimizing your site’s code – i.e. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
In other words, this free plugin helps make your code as lean as possible so that it loads quickly.
In terms of caching, Autoptimize doesn’t offer as many options as other providers. To be precise, Autoptimize doesn’t offer proper page caching at all, and people therefore often use it in combination with specific caching plugins (a few of which are mentioned below).
If you want to use Autoptimize with WP Rocket, that’s entirely possible. WP Rocket is even compatible with Autoptimize out of the box, so the two plugins can work together seamlessly to improve your page speed.
Thanks to the integration of ShortPixel – a plugin that will be mentioned below – you can compress large image files with Autoptimize very easily.
FYI: WP Rocket does not offer this feature.
At GREYD we work exclusively with Autoptimize, and we have even developed an optimized integration for GREYD.SUITE.
You don’t have to worry about all the settings in detail – you can activate the settings we recommend with just 1 click.
Of course, you can still make customizations if you prefer. Also, we have automated the cache clearing, so that the cache does not have to be cleared manually every time.