The best WordPress plugins to improve performance

I see this getting asked a lot, and I’ve just answered this exact question on Reddit.

The thing is, the best plugins are not plugins.

Website performance should start at the basics – your hosting and your site code. In the case of the previously mentioned Reddit post, some digging revealed that their hosting sucked and was the cause of all the speed issues that they were seeing.

Performance plugins are just band-aids, covering over the issues caused by other things. And, more often than not, they can cause additional issues themselves. The reality is, it’s better to fix the root cause.

So, hosting. If it’s good, it will be fast “out of the box”. They’ll be running you on performant servers with the latest versions of PHP, etc. Yes, I work for the parent company, Automattic, but if you want to see superb hosting performance, WordPress.com do just that. Pressable is another host, which is owned by Automattic and runs on the same infrastructure – this blog is hosted by them. Neither WordPress.com or Pressable are the cheapest hosting, but as someone who has used budget hosts before, you really do get what you pay for.

Next, is your code. The themes and plugins that you use will make a big difference to your site performance. Try switching your theme to a basic, default one, and see if that makes a difference. For plugins, much the same – try turning them off to see what difference they make and evaluate them all – is the performance hit they make to your site worth what they do? Are there alternatives?

How many plugins do you use?

This question gets asked a lot and it’s such a blunt instrument. You can run one poor performing plugin on your site or 30 really good ones.

The number of plugins you use is not proportional to performance.

And, indeed, the number you have in no way indicates a good or bad website generally. I’ve seen a lot of people be quite down on people running a lot of plugins, as if that’s an issue by default. The only thing it definately does is give you a slightly bigger security concern (assuming those plugins aren’t your own).

Is this always the answer?

Of course not. You can have the fastest hosting and the best code base and still ruin performance with bad content (e.g. over-sized images). But my recommendation is that this is where you start – look at these basic 2 concepts before moving onto anything further. If you skip this, whatever plugins you try installing are unlikely to do very much.

But my PageSpeed score says…

PageSpeed is a necessary evil, as how you do on this will go towards how Google ranks you (assuming Google rank is important to you – this isn’t something I ever monitor, as this isn’t important to me, being a personal blog site). But I’ve seen so many people installing plugin after plugin to chase down these scores, spending hour upon hour to increase their score by a percentage point, whilst adding nothing to the visitor experience. Just be wary – “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good“.