The Best WordPress Performance Plugins

The official WordPress plugins repository has over 56,000 plugins, which means finding the best WordPress performance plugin for adding a functionality to your website needs a lot of time. This is where we come in!

The Best WordPress Performance Plugins: Free and Paid

Do you want to speed up your WordPress website? Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase page views, and help improve SEO. This is why we have tried to cover those WordPress performance plugins that are crucial to improve your website speed immediately.

breeze wordpress plugin

Breeze

Breeze is one of the best free WordPress plugins developed by Cloudways. It excels in three different areas: performance, convenience, and simplicity. Once activated, Breeze creates a menu with five different options in the WordPress dashboard.

  • Grouping/minification of CSS/JS
  • Support for deferred loading
  • Include/exclude specific URLs
  • Integrated GZIP compression
  • Support for Varnish and CDN
autoptimize wordpress plugin

Autoptimize

Autoptimize makes optimizing your site easy and can improve WordPress' performance even when your host has page caching already and when you use HTTP/2. It does so by optimizing JavaScript, CSS, Images and more.

  • Remove render-blocking of JS and CSS
  • Minification/concatenation of JS and CSS
  • Image optimization including lazyload
  • Google Fonts optimization
  • Preload critical resources
shortpixel image optimizer wordpress plugin

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

Image compression helps your site stay optimized, and that helps in improved search engine rankings as well. And ShortPixel image optimizer is a free plugin that lets you optimize your images and resize and rescale if needed for optimal website performance.

  • Compress JPG and PDF documents
  • Compatible with retina 2x
  • Works for WooCommerce enabled websites.
  • Compatible with WPML and its media plugins
  • Compatible with watermarking plugins
wp reset database plugin

WP Reset

WP Reset - Most Advanced Reset Tool is a great plugin to quickly reset your site’s database to default installation without modifying any files. The theme provides one-click restore as well, so it’s entirely safe to use in case you want to go back to default settings on your site.

  • WP-CLI support
  • Database snapshots
  • Multi-site support
  • Partial reset tools
  • Delete .htaccess files
wp rocket wordpress plugin

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is not only a caching plugin but also incorporates other functions to improve the speed of your WordPress website. Among them is the fast delivery of static content, database optimization, integration with other tools, and many more.

  • Enable GZIP compression
  • Defer JavaScript Loading
  • Minification/concatenation
  • Cloudflare compatibility
  • Google Fonts optimization
perfmatters wordpress plugin

Perfmatters

Perfmatters is one of the premium WordPress plugins that can make improvements to your website performance, reducing HTTP requests, and web page size. You can easily deactivate dash icons, emojis, scripts on a per-page/post basis, etc.

  • Disable embeds and XML-RPC
  • Remove query strings
  • Integrated Script Manager
  • Enable/disable DNS Prefetching
  • Disable or limit post revisions
wp dbmanager wordpress plugin

WP-DBManager

WP-DBManager is a classic among WordPress plugins, offers everything necessary to keep the database always in perfect condition. It's really useful and powerful with an unusual feature; you can run your own query in SQL.

  • Backup/restore database
  • Run selected queries
  • Automatic scheduling
  • Delete backup database
  • optimize/repair database
wp optimize wordpress plugin

WP-Optimize

With nearly a million installations, WP-Optimize is one of the most popular plugins dedicated to cleaning and optimizing WordPress databases. It removes unnecessary data from your database including comments you no longer need, pingbacks, trackbacks, etc.

  • Show database statistics
  • Delete all unnecessary data
  • Automatic weekly cleanings
  • Optimize MySQL tables
  • Perform optimization options
query monitor wordpress plugin

Query Monitor

Query Monitor aims at debugging and analyze the queries and the correctness of the code. It is an extremely useful WordPress plugin that detects and highlights almost any type of error that may occur during website development.

  • Show queries and errors
  • Filter the queries by type
  • Show all the hooks executed
  • Provide scripts included on a page
  • Highlight HTTP requests
lazy load wordpress plugin

Lazy Load by WP Rocket

Lazy Load by WP Rocket simply works to optimize the lazy loading of images without any additional options. The plugin loads image thumbnails and video iframes to speed up the page speed. The script is also lightweight and does not use any jQuery.

  • Improve loading time
  • Reduce HTTPs requests
  • No JavaScript library
  • Replace Youtube iframes
  • Script weight is > 10KB
a3 lazy load wordpress plugin

a3 Lazy Load

a3 Lazy Load focuses on mobile devices and allows the loading of multimedia content much faster. It is considered one of the easiest plugins to use for lazy loading. It supports different video-sharing platforms including YouTube, Vimeo, and HTML5 videos.

  • Lazy loading for images
  • Support for iFrames
  • WordPress AMP compatible
  • Different lazy load effects
  • WordPress Multisite ready
ewww image optimizer wordpress plugin

EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer optimizes the images that you have already uploaded or going to upload in the future. The cloud version of this plugin allows you to take advantage of an external service for image optimization without burdening your server.

  • Automatically resize your images
  • Compress and optimize images
  • Best compression and quality ratio
  • Server-level compression option
  • Backups store for original images
smush wordpress plugin

Smush

WP Smush does not require any special configuration to optimize image file size on your WordPress website. Leveraging the WPMU DEV WordPress Smush API, this plugin saves several KB by reducing the weight of every single image loaded on your website.

  • Resize/compress your images
  • Automatically optimize new images
  • Set the maximum image resolution
  • Optimize up to 50 images at a time
  • Process PNG, JPEG, JPG, and GIF
bunnycdn wordpress plugin

BunnyCDN

BunnyCDN is a fast, powerful, reliable network designed to provide better performance at a more affordable cost globally. Also, setting up the Bunny CDN plugin will improve your website performance to load faster than standard.

  • Easy to use and configure
  • Replace static links with CDN
  • Automatic HTTPS configuration
  • Include/exclude directories
  • Set a custom CDN hostname
cloud flare wordpress plugin

Cloudflare

Cloudflare itself provides a CDN service to optimize the delivery of your website content globally. With this plugin, you can easily set up and integrate Cloudflare CDN along with additional features such as cache purge, firewall rules, header rewrite, etc.

  • WAF with built-in rulesets
  • Automatic cache purge
  • Mitigate specific threats
  • View detailed analytics
  • Support for HTTP2/Server Push
w3 total cache wordpress plugin

W3 Total Cache

With several configuration options, W3 Total Cache is the optimal solution for advanced users. It also allows you to customize all the parameters: from the minimization of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to the asynchronous loading of some parts of a page.

  • Minification and GZIP compression
  • Optimize web browser rendering
  • Support for Cloudflare and New Relic
  • Reverse proxy integration
  • Compatible with other plugins
wp super cache wordpress plugin

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a simple solution to enable a cache system on a WordPress website. Basically, this plugin generates static HTML pages starting from the contents (articles and pages) of your website and exponentially reduces the use of server-side resources.

  • Create cached copies
  • Load content faster
  • Compress of static files
  • Built-in “Garbage Collection”
  • Complete CDN support
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