Speedy Plugins

In this video we're going to cover optimizing your site based on plugin selection. My name is Ethan and I'm a member of our enterprise support team here at WP Engine. I'm going to take you through some of these plugins and why they increase performance, with the goal of educating you on the reasons why these plugins increase your site’s speed so that you can make an informed decision on whether the plugin will be a good fit for your site.

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The first plugin we are going to discuss is BJ Lazy Load. Lazy Loading allows your sites to load images that are in the user’s current browser window. If an image has not been in the user’s browser window, then the image does not get loaded.

So as the user scrolls down the page, the images will load once the user's browser window scrolls over the image.
This can be good for sites that are image heavy but can hurt sites that do not have a lot of images. This is because the Lazy Loader uses a technology called AJAX which isn’t cacheable.

With BJ Lazy Load enabled on a site with few images the requests to the plugin through Admin AJAX could be larger than just loading the images – so you'll want to A/B test it with webpagetest.org to be sure it’s a good fit for your site.

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The next plugin we will talk about is Async JS and CSS. This plugin can take your static files, like CSS files and JS files, and load them all at the same time rather than one after another. Also, it does some fancy work on positioning these static resources in the correct place on your web page by placing render blocking resources at the end – this will allow your page to render without any significant hiccups.

Note though, that this does not work with themes that store the CSS or JS portions of the site in the database, which we discuss in our Theme Bloat video.

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The last plugin we want to talk about is WP Optimize. WP Optimize accomplishes some database clean up tasks for you. It does so by removing unnecessary post revisions, post draft, orphaned plugin options, spam comments, and a few other values from the database. For example, if you have a post which is 100KB of data and you have 5 revisions of that post, the total space wasted is about 500KB. If you have 100 posts similar to it, you have 50MB of database space wasted, so it’s easy to see how much impact cleaning out that information can have.

Well, this does it for the plugin section of site performance, thanks for watching!

Some plugins in addition with server side caching can help your site perform better. While these plugins can help, they are by no means a cure all solution.

In this video we will evaluate a few options you have in speeding up your site using plugins.