Already back in January 2018 Google announced that Page Speed would be a ranking factor from July 2018. For webmasters this means optimizing your website for Page Speed using the Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insight. In this blogpost we will focus on what plugins that will help you achieve a recommended score.
What Page Speed Plugins do I need?
To optimize the pagespeed of your website you need a caching and preferable a preloader plugin. This will allow your website to cache images and resources and serve it faster to the users. I will show you how to set up the plugins in this post.
WP Rocket by WP Media
WP Rocket is by far the easiest and best plugin for optimizing your WordPress site. Made by WP Media and easy to set up with their plugin and play. The plugin should be setup like this:
Keep the rest of the settings as standard.
Imagify by WP Media
Imagify is made by WP Media as well and works with WP Rocket. Easily compress your images when you upload them and it does also have a bulk optimizer that will optimize your old images. Keep all settings as standard. This plugin is not free but very cheap. You can choose between a recommended monthly plan or a one-time plan to optimize all images you already have.
Lighthouse by butterflymedia
Lighthouse is the third and final plugin. This plugin is $17 and is specifically targeted at the Google Lighthouse Score. There is no perfect way to set it up so my recommendation is to play around with the settings and check your Lighthouse Score and how it changes.
If you have any questions to the plugins let me know on e-mail [email protected]