Three unique WordPress plugins to make your website faster
Something that can significantly slow down your site speed is an overloaded server. If your site is overloaded because it is doing legitimate work (serving pages to real users) then you need to increase your system resources. That said, if it’s being overwhelmed by attack attempts, your site performance can drop significantly, even if there is no security breach.
I’m going to show you two plugins that help mitigate that, and one that simply makes the admin area much nicer to use.
Here we go!
This is basically a firewall, but one with a very specific purpose. It sniffs every incoming requests for common attack strings like eval(, base64, and other similar things, and blocks them. It still spins up PHP (it’s a plugin after all) but it doesn’t need MySQL, so it can drastically reduce the load on your server.
There is no configuration, it simply works. There is a pay version that has many more features, and a configuration area, but the free version does its job very nicely.
Something important to know is that this plugin does NOT conflict with other firewalls or WAFs like WordFence or Sucuri. It’s just an added layer.
It’s pretty common to hide the WordPress login page for security. The efficacy of this is debated, but for this post the reason I’m suggesting it is performance.
Plugins that hide the login page tend to replace it with the 404 page. The problem with this is that the 404 page often loads MORE than the login page, which is contrary to what we want. The solution to this (assuming your server is Apache) is to write something in the .htaccess file to return a 403 Forbidden error. This prevents WordPress from loading at all, and again dramatically reduces the load on your server.
Fortunately the code you need to put into your .htaccess file is quite simple. It needs to be placed above the WordPress block.
<Files wp-login.php>
deny from all
</Files>
This is a quite new plugin released by my friend Weston. It’ not related to security in any way, it simply makes the process of using the WordPress admin much much faster. It’s not a caching plugin in the traditional sense, as you can see from the name. The BF stands for BackForward. It makes it so that when you press either the back button or the forward button in your browser the page that comes up loads instantly.
This may seem simple, and perhaps narrowly focused, but in daily use it makes the admin area much nicer to use.
Summary
These three plugins each make an impact on your performance, but as a group they can dramatically improve the experience of using your website.
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