Top 5 Free Performance Booster Plugins for WordPress

Slow and steady wins the race. Everyone must have heard that from somewhere at least once. Well, sadly, this isn’t the case when it comes to websites. In the era of digitization, people want everything to be done within the blink of an eye, especially when it comes to a website’s loading speed and performance. 

Imagine a customer visits your website, and it takes a little longer than 3 seconds to load. What will he do? Hop on to the next site. Duh! Statistics indicate that more than 40% of visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. 

That’s why we are going to talk about how to solve a great number of performance issues and boost your website’s performance even if you don’t experience speed issues(or you just think so!).

Let’s start with the basics without complicating stuff.

What Is Website Performance and Why Is It Vital to Boost It?

In simpler terms, Website performance is all about how fast your website is, under the hood (code) and to the eye of a regular website visitor. 

It’s important to optimize the website’s performance because a fast loading website directly impacts user experience, satisfaction, engagement, and conversions of your online presence. 

The major concern is that the general website performance optimization rules are just part of the solution; you should choose your performance optimization strategies based on what type of website you have and how it functions at the moment.

Believe it or not, but you can actually use a WordPress performance booster plugin to improve the performance of your current WordPress plugins. Sounds ironic, right? Well, we also thought the same at first but then we realised it’s actually a good idea. Let’s see how. 

What Is a WordPress Performance Plugin? 

A WordPress Performance Plugin simply intervenes with caching, image optimization, and database management to improve the speed and performance of a website. 

It helps by improving the website’s loading time, enhancing user experience, and also reduces bounce rates on your website. No matter how many plugins you have on your WordPress, as long as they all are lightweight and clean coded, it doesn’t matter and doesn’t affect your website’s performance. 

A performance booster plugin can help your WordPress website in so many other ways as well. Let’s understand how it helps us in different ways and why it is so important.

• Speed Optimization by minifying code.
• Database Optimized by cleaning up and removing spam data.
• Improves SEO and makes Google happy.
• No more bounce rates with super fast loading.
• Increases conversion rate through better user experience.

How to boost performance on WordPress

There are multiple ways to do so – based on what you already have in place on your site and whether you want to use user-friendly WordPress performance booster plugins or involve the developer’s assistance.

But first, what influences website performance and what are general solutions to them?

Now it’s time to break it down and get a quicker solution:

Performance Factors	Optimization Solutions for WordPress
Latency (the time your site’s content travels from the server to a user’s computer.)	Use content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute content closer to users. -> Use Jetpack CDN Optimize server response times. -> Choose faster hosting. Minimize HTTP requests. -> Reduce the number of files or their size.
Application Size	Compress and optimize images. -> Compress or automatically with the WP Compress plugin. Minify CSS and JavaScript files. -> Replace animated files with static ones. Use caching plugins. -> Use WP Rocket
Number of DOM Nodes	Limit unnecessary elements. Avoid overly complex page structures. Minimize unnecessary plugins and scripts.
Number of Resource Requests	Implement asynchronous loading -> Async JavaScript
JavaScript Performance	Optimize JavaScript code
CPU Load	Use efficient hosting services.
Overall	Implement lazy loading for images and videos.  Optimize font usage. Use browser caching.

A lot of work here, and this is not the limit. However, even if you try to apply at least a few methods, you can notice significant changes to the overall website performance on your WordPress!

What Are Good Free Performance Booster Plugins for WordPress?

If you are looking for good performance booster plugins for WordPress, there are many. But if you go looking for good “Free” performance booster plugins, there are only a few.

Thus, we’ve done our research based on its features, what they include in its free version and what they include in its paid versions, its active installations and ratings as well. All the plugins we’ve hand picked are user friendly and developer friendly as well for users who are looking for lightning speed performance at a minimal cost or no cost at all.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into the list.

Autoptimize

Autoptimize is the best free WordPress plugin that fulfills one of the most crucial tasks: boosts the performance by optimizing your site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources. It is a perfect choice if your main focus is on front end optimizations. 

Key Features of Autoptimize:

• Minify (decrease the size) of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
• Optimize the loading of critical CSS by including it inline within your HTML.
• Enable crucial lazy load effects for images.
• Improve the google fonts loading.
• Improve the “First Contentful Paint” metric by generating critical path CSS.

Pricing: Autoptimize is completely free however, you can add more power to Autoptimize with Pro which starts at $12.99/month.

Active Installations: 1+ million

Ratings: 4.7/5

Async JavaScript

Async JavaScript is a really handy performance booster free WordPress plugin that modifies how JavaScript files load on your website by enabling the rest of the page content to load and display while the scripts load in the background. 

Key Features of Async JavaScript:

• Handles JavaScript animations.
• Integrates so called ‘defer loading’ to load JavaScript files after the entire HTML content and other assets have been loaded.
• Improves the load on the server to enhance the overall user experience.

Pricing: Async JavaScript is completely free. 

Active Installations: 90,000+

Ratings: 4.7/5

A3 Lazy Load

In comparison to other performance booster plugins in this blog, A3 Lazy Load is the one plugin that is rather focused at one task: integrating the lazy-loading effects for images and other content.

Besides that, it fully supports the jQueryMobile framework, WordPress multisite, and RTL display. This plugin works best even on content heavy websites. 

Key Feature of A3 Lazy Load: 

• Customize how lazy loading is implemented.
• Integrate lazy loading into a wider variety of content and widgets, such as maps or any other.
• Add lazy loading to videos and iframes.
• Easily loads with any WordPress themes that follow WordPress Theme Codex.

Pricing: A3 Lazy Load is completely free. 

Active Installations: 100,000+

Ratings: 4.3/5

Query Monitor

Query Monitor is a developer oriented solution to help you monitor the website’s performance issues. This plugin works best for coders as they can enable debugging of database queries, PHP errors, block editor blocks, enqueued scripts, HTTP API Calls and so much more.

It offers advanced features such as debugging of Ajax calls and REST API calls to quickly find plugins which are affecting your website’s performance.

Key Features of Query Monitor: 

• Insightful database containing details about the number of queries, the time taken for each query, and the specific queries executed.
• Hooks and actions to monitor plugins and themes, as well as how they affect the current page.
• Capturing PHP errors and warnings.
• Monitoring of scheduled cron events.

Pricing: Query Monitor is completely free. 

Active Installations: 200,000+

Ratings: 4.9/5

Advanced Excerpt

Last but not least, Advanced Excerpt is a really handy plugin to optimize excerpts on your WordPress site. It helps with a better user experience and indirectly impacts performance in a few ways.

It keeps HTML markup in the excerpt so you can choose which tags to include. With this plugin, you can also customise the excerpt length, the ellipsis character or even add a “read more” link to your text. Its all features are optional and can also be fully customized to fit in with your theme. 

Key Features of Advanced Excerpt:

• Replace the default excerpt text with a custom one of your choice.
• Have more control over your read more tags.
• Apply the advanced excerpt settings to specific custom post types on your site.

Pricing: Advanced Excerpt is completely free. 

Active Installations: 80,000+

Ratings: 4.4/5

Conclusion: Optimize Your WordPress Website Performance

Now it all may seem a little overwhelming like what exactly should you do or which plugin to choose for optimizing your WordPress website’s performance. 

Don’t Worry! We have a simple list of steps which you can follow in order to start optimizing your website performance.

1. Optimize and speed up your website by what you can do manually, like compress images, reduce the size of videos, and integrate lazy loads.
2. Choose quality hosting.
3. Regularly monitor the performance of your site.

It’s as simple as that. No need for any development team. Just with a little knowledge and assistance, you can make your website work at lightning speed. If you are looking for a more strategic approach, there are a few things to keep in mind before jumping straight to any conclusion: 

• Reduce the website loading time.
• Implement so called lazy loading techniques.
• Smooth the animated parts.
• Use a lightweight, well coded WordPress theme.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript.
• Use caching plugins.

Now you’re all set to go! Choose any of these free performance booster plugins to make your website load within the blink of an eye.

FAQs

How can plugins improve performance?

These performance booster plugins mostly focus on optimizing multiple aspects to improve a website’s overall performance:

• Caching
• Image Compression
• Code Minification
• CDN Integrations
• Database Optimization

Which plugin is best for image optimization?

The best plugins for Image optimization are ShortPixel and Imagify with advanced features. However, if you are looking for a free option, A3 Lazy Load is a good option to consider for lazy loading images.

What is the best free plugin to speed up WordPress website?

Autoptimize is the best free plugin to speed up your WordPress website. It helps minify HTML, CSS and JS code to reduce page loading time. It is a perfect choice if you are looking for a plugin that focuses on front end optimizations and improves users’ experience.