One of the great strengths of the WordPress ecosystem is the availability of many thousands of great plugins. Some of them will slow your WordPress website down, others may help you speed it up. This page presents a selection of useful plugins which will either directly improve your site's page load times (performance plugins) or which are more lightweight than their popular alternatives. Only vanilla JS plugins are included in this list, it means that the plugin may not load jQuery on the frontend.
Plugin Categories:
To be included in this list, the plugin may not load jQuery in the frontend, as it is render-blocking and negatively affects page load times. The plugins may load jQuery in the admin area, but in the frontend, they must rely on vanilla JS, or load no javascript at all. The list presents plugins available from the official WordPress repository and commercial marketplaces, as well as those available only from the websites of their developers.