WP Speed of Light – A Performance Enhancement WordPress Plugin

Even if your website has awesome content, if its loading speed is slow, it is going to end up ranking low on search engines. Also, the attention span of online visitors is getting lower day by day. So, a slow-loading website is definitely going to lose on the user engagement part, as visitors are likely to bounce back immediately.

So, if you are running a WordPress website, be it a blog, a portfolio, a business website, or an e-commerce website, speed is a must-have. Fast-loading websites can win on various aspects such as conversion rate, user engagement, and low bounce rate, and ultimately have a good organic ranking on search engines.

It is very simple to improve the speed taken by your WordPress website to load completely if you know exactly which plugin can help you well! I am going to review one of the best performance enhancement plugins today for WordPress, which might help you make a well-informed decision on whether to install or purchase its add-ons or not.

WP Speed of Light is a performance enhancement for WordPress with the most advanced and versatile features that can dramatically boost the speed of your website. It is a free plugin with a variety of technical features for speed optimization.

WP Speed of Light – Technical Features:

WP Speed of Light is made of two versions – a free version and pro add-ons. The free version is full of speed optimization features that can reduce your efforts and resources required to reduce the loading time of your WordPress website. Premium add-ons of WP Speed of Light support more advanced websites that have larger and heavier data that might take longer than usual to load. Let’s check out the features of each version of WP Speed of Light one-by-one.
The free version of WP Speed of Light can:

• Generate page caches
• Improve ranking on Google, Gtmetrix, and Pigdom by removing query strings
• Load CDN content
• Minify JavaScript, HTML, and CSS resources
• Ensure Gzip compression
• Provide a cache cleaner button
• Clean cache on saving content
• Enable multisite compatibility with WordPress
• Optimize the database
• Add browser cache

By optimizing database functions such as post revision, cleaning spam comments, trashbacks, and trashed content, and auto-drafting content, WP Speed of Light can reduce the loading time of your WordPress website efficiently. It is also compatible with various page builders such as DIVI Builder, Site Origine, ACF, Beaver Builder, and Live Composer. With the help of features like periodic cache cleaning cache and content saving, the free version of WP Speed of Light provides complete optimization of the speed of your WordPress website.

If your website contains heavier content like in visual form, premium add-ons of WP Speed of Light can help you speed up the loading of heavy files on your website.

WP Speed of Light Pro Add-on Features

Features of the pro add-ons of WP Speed of Light include:

• Local and Google font optimization
• Exclusion of visual content from grouping and minification
• Scheduling automatic database cleanup
• Cache and DNS preloading
• CDN data cleanup
• Option to disable cache
• Image compression
• Page Caching Exclusion

With features like cache preloading, WP Speed of Light eliminates the time required for generating caches for visitors after their first visit to your website. The pro add-ons also enable image compression up to 1 GB or 3 GB of usage. All these features contribute to reducing the loading time to a great extent and help you increase the loading speed of your WordPress website.

Apart from a wide range of technical features of WP Speed of Light, it is extremely easy to use, even for beginners.

WP Speed of Light – How to Use:

Dashboard

On successfully installing and activating WP Speed of Light, a new menu will be added to your dashboard. The dashboard of the plugin will give a complete overview of the speed performance of your website. It will do so through various indicators such as cache activation, database cleanup, database queries, website loading time, group resources, and resources minification among others.

Speed Analysis

As the name suggests, ‘Speed analysis’ is more about monitoring the speed performance of your website than actually configuring the settings to improve the speed. So, here you can monitor specific page queries and run tests to monitor their load times using WebPageTest API.

Speed Optimization

Here you can configure and activate the cache system on your WordPress website. You can set cache cleanup on saving the content, remove query strings, and add expire headers in order to reduce the loading time of the website. It also lets you minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and group CSS, JavaScript, and local and Google fonts. Advanced optimization enables you to set up DNS prefetching and cache preloading.

Database Cleanup

This tab gives you an option to optimize your entire database or just a specific part of it. You can remove trashbacks and pingbacks, removing all trashed content, cleaning all auto drafted content, cleaning duplicated comments, posts, user meta, and term meta. You can select all, some, or one of these options, and reduce the loading time of your website according to your choice of database optimization.

CDN Configuration

You can connect to an external CDN like Amazon, Cloudflare, KeyCDN, CloudFront, and MaxCDN among others, using CDN integration tab. It can be done by inserting the CDN URL and content, in order to reduce the loading time of your WordPress website in a simpler way.

Configuration

Here you can configure other settings of WP Speed of Light such as allowing different types of users like authors, editors, contributors, and subscribers to access the optimization settings and the WebPageTest API key.

Simplicity in accessing the interface of WP Speed of Light is making it a choice of many WordPress users. PHP 5.3+, PHP7 or 7.1 and WordPress 4.5+ are the only two requirements for the best performance of this WordPress plugin.

WP Speed of Light Demo

WP Speed of light has proven to reduce the site load time massively. In a test, where earlier the site load time was 4.9 seconds (page size 1.5MB), after the use of this plugin, the site load time reduced to 0.8 seconds!

How awesome is that?

You can take a look at an in-depth demo of WP Speed of Light to look for yourself what wonders this plugin is capable of doing.

Pricing

The absolutely free version of WP Speed of Light is available for all the WordPress websites, while it also offers some paid add-ons with two payment schemes as follows:

Pro version + 6-month support and update – $34 (Image compression quota of 1 GB)
Pro version + 1-year support and update – $44 (Image compression quota of 3 GB)

WP Speed of Light – Review Conclusion:

WP Speed of Light manages to improve the loading speed of WordPress websites to a greater extent. It can prove to be a great deal for you to download free as well as pro version of this plugin.

WP Speed of Light simply reduces the loading time of your WordPress website and enhances the chances of your website to score higher on the leading search engines with the better user experience.

You also check out the documentation of WP Speed of Light to gain more insights about it.