WPMU DEV Hummingbird Pro
In today’s digital world, website speed and performance are critical to the success of your website. With Google’s ever-changing algorithm, website owners are now placing an emphasis on page speed optimization to ensure their website is not only fast but ranks higher in search engine results pages. That’s where WPMU Dev Hummingbird plugin comes in. It’s interface helps improve website speed and performance by optimizing various elements of your website.
WPMU Dev Hummingbird is a WordPress plugin that is designed to help website owners optimize their website performance. The plugin is developed by WPMU DEV, a leading provider of WordPress plugins, themes, and hosting.
The Hummingbird helps website owners to reduce the loading times of their website pages, which can lead to improved user experience, higher search engine rankings, and increased conversion rates.
How Does WPMU Dev Hummingbird Plugin Work?
The Hummingbird plugin uses a range of optimization techniques to help improve your website performance, including:
- Caching – Hummingbird caches your website pages. It means that they load faster for returning visitors.
- Compression. Compresses your website files, which reduces their size and improves page loading times.
- Minification. Removes unnecessary code from your website files, reducing their size and improves page loading times.
- Asset Optimization. The plugin optimizes your website files to ensure that they load in the correct order.
Installing The Plugin
Installing WPMU Dev Hummingbird Plugin is a straightforward process. You can either install the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository, or you can download the plugin from the Devtools Club website and install it manually.
Once you have installed the plugin, you will need to activate it and configure the settings. The plugin includes a setup wizard that will guide you through the process of configuring the plugin.
The wizard will ask you a series of questions about your website and your optimization preferences. Based on your answers, the plugin will recommend the best optimization settings for your website.
Once you have completed the setup wizard, you can fine-tune the plugin settings to optimize your website further. The plugin includes a range of customization options, which allow you to tweak the caching, compression, minification, and asset optimization settings to suit your website requirements.
Hummingbird Dashboard
The plugin dashboard provides an overview of your website performance and optimization status. The dashboard includes the following sections:
- Performance report provides an overview of your website performance, including page loading times and optimization recommendations.
- Asset optimization menu allows you to view and manage your website assets, including images, scripts, and stylesheets.
- The caching section allows you to manage your website page caching settings.
- Minification section allows you to manage your website minification settings.
- GZIP compression section allows you to manage your website GZIP compression settings.
Minification
Minification is the process of removing unnecessary characters and whitespaces from code, such as JavaScript and CSS, without altering their functionality. This process can help to reduce the size of code files and improve website performance.
In the case of Humming bird, the plugin provides advanced minification options. It allows users to compress and optimize JavaScript and CSS files with ease. The plugin’s Asset Optimization feature can automatically compress, combine, and move the files to the footer.
Hummingbird also provides users with the option to defer JavaScript and CSS files, which means that they will only load when required, rather than loading with the rest of the page. This can be useful for optimizing the load times of web pages and ensuring that only the necessary resources are being loaded.
Assets Optimization
Asset optimization is the process of improving website performance by reducing the size of files and streamlining how they are delivered to the user’s browser. This can involve compressing files, combining them, and optimizing the loads order on a web page.
WPMU Dev Hummingbird includes advanced asset optimization tools to help you streamline the delivery of your website’s assets. With Hummingbird, you can compress and combine files, move them to the footer of your site, defer the loading of non-critical assets, and more.
When it comes to asset optimization, Hummingbird is highly effective. The plugin provides a user-friendly interface for managing your website’s assets and offers a range of features that allow you to customize how your site’s files are optimized. For example, Hummingbird can identify the CSS and JavaScript files used by each plugin and theme installed on your site, so you can optimize each file individually.
Image Optimization
By integrating with Smush Pro, Hummingbird can help you achieve even faster load times by compressing images on your website without sacrificing quality. The integration also allows you to manage and optimize your images right from the Hummingbird dashboard.
After installing and activating Smush Pro, you can access the Smush settings from the Hummingbird dashboard. You can optimize all of your images at once or individually. And, you can also set up automatic optimization so that new images are automatically optimized.
Smush Pro also provides other image-related features, such as resizing, lazy loading, and bulk optimization. All of these features can be managed and customized right from the Hummingbird dashboard, making it even more convenient to optimize your website for faster load times.
Cloudflare and Redis
Both the Cloudflare and Redis integrations in Hummingbird Pro provide an easy way to speed up your website and improve its performance.
Cloudflare is a content delivery network that can help speed up your website by caching your content on servers distributed around the world. With the Cloudflare integration in Hummingbird Pro, you can easily configure Cloudflare settings from the Hummingbird dashboard.
Redis is an in-memory data structure store that can be used as a database, cache, and message broker. With the Redis integration in Hummingbird Pro, you can easily configure Redis settings from the Hummingbird dashboard, including setting up Redis caching and enabling Redis object cache.
Available Alternatives
WP Fastest Cache is a caching plugin for WordPress that also includes features for optimizing website performance. It offers options for minifying CSS and JavaScript files, optimizing images, and leveraging browser caching to improve website load times. The plugin has a free version and a premium version with additional features.
WP Rocket is a premium caching and performance optimization plugin for WordPress. It includes features for minifying CSS and JavaScript files, optimizing images, and leveraging browser caching. It also offers options for optimizing databases and integrating with content delivery networks (CDNs) and other third-party services.
Autoptimize is a free plugin for WordPress that includes features for optimizing website performance. It offers options for minifying CSS and JavaScript files, optimizing images, and leveraging browser caching to improve website load times.
W3 Total Cache Pro is more focused on caching and may require more configuration to achieve optimal performance. The plugin also has a steeper learning curve and may not be as user-friendly as Hummingbird for beginners. Additionally, while W3 Total Cache Pro has a free version.
Simon Maimon –
Outstanding tool to analyze entire website in couple of minutes. Even you are going to use autoptimize or wprocket i will recommend install Hummingbird and run it once to receive full picture.