All of us want to increase our website page load speeds. So this week, we’re going to look at the A2 Optimized WP Plugin for WordPress websites. I ran some speed tests before and after installing and configuring this plugin and its worked great for me and on another site I manage.
I heard about A2 Optimized WP Plugin on Adam Silver’s Kitchen Sink WP podcast. He does a short, weekly show on all things WordPress that I never miss. Incidentally, his intro music is the fav of any podcast I listen to!
We both use A2 Hosting for our sites. I had a rocky start with A2 late last year, but things were resolved and now I’m a very happy customer of A2 Hosting.
What Does A2 Optimized WP Plugin Do?
The A2 Optimized WP plugin focuses on two things – speed and security. In the WordPress world, it’s pretty well known that using the W3 Total Cache plugin correctly will increase your website’s speed by caching and minifying different elements of your site (it’s all in the description – click the image above). I’m not the most technical person in the world and I had some problems with configuring the W3 plugin, so when I saw that the A2 plugin would take care of the heavy lifting in the background, i thought I’d give it a try.
Configuring A2 Optimized WP
It wasn’t too hard to configure the settings. The explanations along the way were pretty good and I could always Bing topics and get results. Here’s a video I did for you if you want to step through the process with me. (Click the button on this page to subscribe to my YouTube channel and don’t miss any videos.)
My Website Page Load Results with A2
Also in the video are my before and after speed test results. I used these four sites to check the before and after:
https://gtmetrix.com/ From 3.5s to 2.5s
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/ From 55/100 to 75/100
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ From 2.19 to 1.39
http://www.webpagetest.org/ From 4.2 to 2.5
You can see my site was actually pretty fast before, but I did improve the page load times along with getting some images compressed using a setting from within the A2 plugin along with doing a general compression of all uncompressed images using the EWWW Optimize plugin.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to increase your page load speed, give the A2 Optimized WP Plugin a try. It’s free (there is a premium version) and it’ll work with any web host, it doesn’t have to be just with A2 hosting.