The Best WordPress Speed Optimization Plugin Combo
WordPress speed optimization is as essential to your traffic growth as it is to your content itself. If you didn’t know it already, your page speed might be driving away your customers. Some factors that slow down your pages are out of your control (like time to first-byte). Yet, there’s still a lot you can do to optimize your page speed. Google does factor in page speed when indexing websites on search. A slow page speed leads to a loss of users and a higher bounce rate.
WordPress Speed Optimization
The beauty of WordPress is that there are plugins out there for almost anything you want to achieve. When it comes to speed optimization, it’s hard to achieve any visible results if you only rely on a single plugin. By combining 2 or more your chances of speeding up your WordPress website are much higher.
I have been testing top optimization plugins including;
They are the top contenders when it comes to WordPress speed optimization. However, most don’t work out of the box. They need a bit of trial and error configuration combinations to achieve the best results on your website.
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Without further ado, the winning combination (drum-roll) is WP Super Cache + Fast Velocity Minify. Before I break down the reasons why this is the perfect combination, here are some figures from the best-known speed test tools available online:
You can carry out these test on our blog on your own and see the figures for yourself!
Why WP Super Cache is a Must
Other than being one of the most downloaded WordPress caching plugins, WP Super Cache comes as tried and tested. It is compatible with most of the top WordPress page builders and security plugins. Its simple but powerful and will give you a noticeable speed improvement by itself. By combining it with Fast Velocity Minify you will get even better WordPress speed optimization
Why You Should Choose Fast Velocity Minify
Fast Velocity Minify seems lesser known as compared to its peers like Autoptimize. Out of the box, both Fast Velocity Minify and Autoptimize perform the same function. Both can async load, defer and inline scripts and CSS whenever possible. Fast Velocity Minify does a better job without the major downsides of its more popular counterpart. There’s no drawback I have met when it comes to this plugin.
Autoptimize suffers a huge drawback as it introduces a new issue. It seems to defer javascript so bad that PageSpeed shows “prioritizing above-the-fold content,” as a new issue. Although you can skip differing the JavaScript library with both plugins, Fast Velocity Minify handles this way better.
Although these 2 plugins seem to get the job done, they do not address all factors that affect your page speed. Image sizes, and server response time are also major factors to keep in mind when optimizing. Google released Mod PageSpeed, an Apache module that optimizes your site on the go. The many compatibility issues with WordPress disqualify it as the missing link here. In my tests, having the module on increased the server response time, further affecting the TTFB
Conclusion
Do give these 2 plugins a try and remember to balance out even when optimizing. Do not overdo one aspect as it might negatively affect your website’s appearance. Skipping deferring the JavaScript library will often be a good choice (you can still allow its minification). Let me know in the comments which plugin combination works best for you.
