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Detailed Review of WP Performance Score Booster – Increase your website page speed with a push of a button
The bar has been raised.
Writing great content with step by step instructions on specific topics isn’t enough anymore. If you want to get to the first page of Google, and stay there.
Today, only the content won’t help you get more traffic to your site, you will also need to provide great user experience to your audience. But how can you do this?
Aside from designing your website to ease your visitors navigation, you will also need to make it load fast.
There are a lot of free and paid plugins that are created to speed-up your website, but few of them are getting the job done.
In this detailed review I am going to test one really simple, but yet powerful WordPress plugin designed to increase web page loading speed and grant better user experience to your visitors. The name of the plugin is WP Performance Score Booster. Let’s begin:
What does this plugin actually do?
WP Performance Score Booster will significantly increase web page loading speed of your WordPress site improving the overall performance and user experience. Like you probably know, website speed is one of the Google ranking factors and one of your main jobs should be to make your site loads fast.
Who is this plugin for? And is it for you?
In general, for WordPress websites. I would recommend it to small or medium-sized WordPress sites and to people who don’t have much technical knowledge. You will see why later in this review.
Installing WP Performance Score Booster
Since this is a free plugin, the whole installation process can easily happen from the WordPress admin panel. Go to your website backend visiting yourdomain.com/wp-admin > Plugins > Add new. In the search bar located on the right side type the name of the plugin and click Enter:
If you see more than one result, make sure to install the one created by Dipak C. Gajjar, clicking on the Install button:
Getting started with WP page speed plugin
Quite a few plugins have gone through my WordPress website, and pretty much all of them required a lot of setting up and tweaking after the initial installation.
When I first added WP Performance booster to my site, I thought to myself: “Where are the other options?”. I’ve gone through my admin backend to see if there is something else I am missing, but I wasn’t.
After you successfully add the plugin to your site, a new menu icon will appear on the left panel of your WordPress site called: WP Performance Score Booster. When accessing this you will see the following screen:
Like you can see from the screenshot above, there are only 3 settings that are already checked and working. Besides from these shown here, there is nothing more to adjust.
WP performance Score booster increases your website page speed by doing these 3 main things:
- Remove query strings from static content.
- Enable GZIP compression (compress text, html, javascript, css, xml and so on)
- Set expire caching (Leverage Browser Caching)
If for some reason your theme or other plugins are not working after the installation, disable/enable the settings one by one to see which one is causing a conflict.
Additionally, you can contact the plugin developer by visiting his official site: Dipakgajjar.com. Or, by opening a support thread on WordPress.org official plugin page.
Testing our website load speed before and after installation of the plugin
When I saw the few options inside the configuration page of the plugin, It led me to believe that it won’t actually improve the performance of my website. So of course, I had to run some test to see does it actually works.
Inside the description of the plugin Dipak C. Gajjar (The actual Developer) is clearly stating that his plugin will increase the performance of ours sites when testing with Pingdom tools, GTmetrix and etc.
Firstly, I will test another site I am currently developing to see what are the current stats. You can run the same test on your website by following the instructions below:
Testing site performance using Pingdom tools:
Visit Pingdom website speed test using this link here: Pingdom.com
You can even select from which location your website to be tested by clicking Settings, a dropdown menu will appear allowing you to choose one of the available test locations:
Type your domain name in the empty field and click test now:
These are the numbers before activating WP Performance booster plugin. As you can see, the site is not performing as good as I wish. Here is an overview of the site current performance:
- The Performance Grade is 85/100
- Requests: 50
- Load time: 3.50 sec
- Page size: 1 M
Now, let’s see if there is going to be a difference in site speed when activating WP performance booster.
From inside our WordPress admin panel go to Plugins > Activate the plugin:
To compare the results from the previous test, I am setting the same locations for this speed test also. Go to Pingdom.com enter your website, and hit Test now:
Wow! Do you see the difference? I have significant boost of speed with a push of a button. What about your website? Let’s take a closer look at the results:
- The Performance Grade is 95/100 + 10 (compare to the previous test)
- Requests: 50
- Load time: 1.56 sec – 1.54 sec (compare to the previous test)
- Page size: 1 M
WP performance booster increased the Performance grade with 10 points and lowered my website loading time with 1.54 seconds, which is 50% faster than before.
Testing site performance using GTmetrix:
Although, I see large improvement in my site speed when testing with Pingdom tools, I still need more proofs. Running speed tests on only one online tool is never enough for me, this is why I will also test my site using GTmetrix. To do the same, follow the steps below:
Firstly, disable WP performance booster from Plugins > Disable.
Go to GTmetrix official website here: Add your website URL and click Analyze:
- Page speed score: A 96%
- YSlow Score: B 83%
- Page load time: 3.4 sec
- Total page size: 0.96 M
- Requests: 49
We have pretty much the same result when testing with Pingdom tools, and before the page speed plugin activated.
Now enable the plugin again, from WordPress Admin Page > Plugins, and run the test again.
These are the results I am getting after enabling WP Performance booster:
- Page speed score: A 96%
- YSlow Score: B 83%
- Page load time: 1.4 sec
- Total page size: 0.96 M
- Requests: 49
My website is loading 2 seconds faster which is more than 50% increase in speed. Not bad for pushing only one button.
Overall look after testing WP Performance Score Booster
The two test showed similar results: more than 50% boost in website speed with a push of a button. Which is quite amazing.
Removing query strings from static content; Enabling GZIP compression (compress text, html, javascript, css, xml and so on) and Setting expire caching (Leverage Browser Caching) is reducing the speed with around 2 seconds.
Keep in mind that the scores and the increase in speed will be different, depending on the website and how well is optimized. Factors that have major effect over your website performance are:
- Size and the number of images.
- Number of plugins.
- Hosting provider.
You should definitely go through the things above if you want to increase your website loading speed.
Pricing
WP Performance Score Booster is totally free WordPress plugin. It can be found and downloaded from WordPress.org plugins section. Or, through this link here: Increase your website page speed.
Additionally, you can find more information about the author and the plugin itself visiting his official website: dipakgajjar.com.
Pros and cons of this page speed plugin
Pros:
- Free plugin.
- Really easy to install.
- Almost nothing to configure after installation. Making it really easy to use.
- Up to 50% increase in website speed.
Cons:
- Lack of settings is a downside for someone wanting to additionally adjust the plugin.
- The plugin may be in conflict with other tools you’ve already installed. Make sure to check and see if everything is working after installation.
Final Thoughts
Fast website pages is one of the key factors for reaching better rankings in Google. While, trying to improve the speed can be tricky, and very time-consuming task.
WP performance booster is free and easy to use plugin, that will significantly increase the performance of your website with a push of a button.
Have you tried WP Performance booster? Share your speed results after the installation?[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row fullwidth=”false” attached=”false” padding=”0″][vc_column width=”1/4″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_btn title=”Download + Full Description” style=”flat” color=”peacoc” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.org%2Fplugins%2Fwp-performance-score-booster%2F|title:Increase%20your%20website%20page%20speed|target:%20_blank” button_block=”true”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/4″][/vc_column][/vc_row]