With more and more traffic on the web it’s easy for websites to slow down, especially with the high amounts of requests trying to retrieve data, but there are tools to compensate heavy loads and boost speeds. In this article I’ll discuss free tools, CDN and others, to boost a WordPress website.

W3 Total Cache

A WPO (WordPress Performance Optimisation) framework, designed to speed up pages and improve user interactions, as well as increasing speeds for browsers, databases, and CDN support.

Benefits include; speeding up a site’s performance tenfold, improving conversion rates which affects a site’s ranking, browser caching, reduced page load time, improved website performance, optimised progressive rending which means pages render quickly, compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and feeds to reduce bandwidth usage.

For a full comprensive list of features and benefits then checkout the plugin here: W3 Total Cache.

WP Super Cache

Cache files with WP Super Cache, a WordPress plugin that produces static HTML files for quicker loading times. The plugin generates static HTML files from a dynamic WordPress blog, the server will then use that file to send to users instead of heavier files like PHP scripts.

Static HTML files are generated and served without invoking a line of PHP code, this boosts a website’s performance if it is heavy in graphics, images, or videos, especially if requests are high from a large quantity of users.

For more info visit WordPress: WP Super Cache.

Pingdom

Pingdom is a service to monitor and maintain websites, alerting users when websites are overburdened or go down. As soon as a website has an issue the user will be the first to know either by email, text, or iPhone alterts.

Features include monitoring a website and servers with detailed reports; altering one or several users when a server goes down by email, text, or Twitter; spot trends in performance with graphs that show uptime, performance, outages, which may show patterns; identify broken or slow websites and find out a server broke and fix it so it doesn’t occur next time; real-time user monitoring show info from users’ browsers, platform, country, or from a specific page on the website; share data with customers by making stats public to show that a website can be relied upon; access Pingdom from anywhere with the iOS and Android app.

Try Pingdom by entering your website to see a detailed analysis: Pingdom Full Page Test. For more info check out their site here: Pingdom.

Smush.it

Smush.it is a plugin for WordPress that reduces file sizes of images by compressing them but keeping the same quality.

When the plugin is installed any images that are added to a page will automatically run through Smush.it and compress images. Quality is kept as bytes are removed from images that are unnecessary – when Smush.it runs on a page it reports the number of bytes that can be saved by optimising the images and provides a zip file with the minimised images.

Find more info on WordPress’ site here: Smush.it.

Lazy Load

Lazy Load is a WordPress plugin that improves load times and server bandwidth by only loading images when visible to the user.

The Lazy Load plugin uses jQuery.sonar, once it is installed all images will only be visible when the user views them, this improves a site’s load time by only displaying viewing images.

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is a WordPress plugin that cleans up databases and optimises without phpMyAdmin.

The plugin removes post revisions, comments in the spam queue, auto-draft posts, un-approved comments within a few clicks and applys mysql optimise commands on database tables without phpMyAdmin.

Why not get started by accelerating your content with CDNify.