Airlift: Free WordPress Plugin for Speed Optimization

Adding WordPress plugins can give your site more flexibility and function. One thing many website owners desire for improved SEO and user experience (UX) is faster speeds. After looking at a number of possible options, we decided to share Airlift with you as a way to decrease load times. 

Those who run websites understand users can be impatient. They want sites to load in a split millisecond or faster. Waiting around for bulky images, videos or typography causes bounce rates to rise. Instead, tapping into the power of this speed optimization plugin improves overall site performance and Google Core Web Vitals scores. 

Since site performance directly impacts user experience, improving speed immediately increases engagement. One study found for every additional second it took a site to load it lost 10% of its users. If a simple plugin can improve speed and thus retention, it’s well worth installing–especially since Airlift has a free version.

Airlift’s Best Features

The same creators behind Migrate Guru and Malware are the creators of Airlift. If you are working on a legacy site or didn’t focus on optimization from the start, you might want to give this plugin a try. Some of the features include:

• Improve your Google ranking with higher speeds 
• Integrated caching stack 
• Asset optimization to improve 
• Core Web Vitals Score 60-second setup

A word of caution here. Most of the reviews of Airlift were positive. However, a couple of people mentioned in online forums that their site slowed down or some images disappeared. If your server is incompatible with the plugin, you may have to uninstall it. As with any plugin or change to your WordPress site, make sure you download a backup before making changes. 

Airlift Is Free with Pro Options

Installing and using Airlift is 100% free. Rather than nickel and diming you to death like some plugins do, you can use it immediately as is. If you want some added features, you can pay $99.50 the first year and $199 each year after and benefit from: 

• Automated Site Re-Optimization 
• Dynamic Images Resized 
• Lazy Loading of Stylesheet Images 
• Auto Purge Cache When Post Updates 
• A Guaranteed Score of 90+ 
• Personalized Priority Customer Support

Designerly advises you try the free version and see how it works for your site. If you need additional support or to improve your scores more, you can invest in the pro version. 

How to Install and Utilize Airlift

Installing Airlift is a bit different than the common ways of adding plugins through your WordPress dashboard. You first have to sign up for a free account with the company. They’ll need your name and email address. 

Once you’ve signed up, you have two options to get Airlift onto your site. You can either share your WordPress login credentials for your site or download and manually upload the files. We recommend a manual upload as it is always smart to keep your login credentials confidential. Yes, it may be faster and easier to let the developer install but you also put your site at some risk by sharing logins.

We downloaded the files and followed this process to install:

Step #1: Upload Airlift File on Website

First, download the manual installation file. Then, navigate to your WordPress dashboard. Click on Plugins/Add New/Upload Plugin/Choose File. Navigate to where you saved the downloaded software, select it and click “Install Now.” Once installed, click on “Activate.”

Step #2: Analysis

Airlift is probably one of the easiest setups we’ve seen in a while. Upon install, the program begins analyzing your site for optimal performance. It will take a while to run through all your images and posts if you have quite a few. 

Source: You’ll wind up with something that looks like this image after analysis. This is your score before you optimize with Airlift.

Step #3: Optimization

Which things you change and how you speed up your site is in your control. We did experience a glitch when trying to optimize the first time and had to contact Airlift. However, nothing broke and the site still worked as expected. 

At this point, you can either contact them for help or you can run the optimization again. We went ahead and ran it again and it functioned perfectly the second time. We then cross-checked the score they gave with what Google said about page speed. If you desire, you can connect your Google Analytics for even more insight. 

Remember that the site was initially a 54 out of 100 before installing the plugin. After running optimization, the score bumped up to 78. Since it was almost effortless, we count that as a big win and at no cost. There was still room for improvement on the tested site, of course, but an increase of 24 points is helpful.

We then ran the optimizer again and it came back with a score of 100 out of 100. We confirmed the score through PageSpeed Insights. Wow! Impressive.

Other Speed Optimization Plugins

While other speed optimization methods exist, one brand was caught faking the Google Score results and another bogs down your website. After careful consideration, we believe Airlift to be superior based on the zero cost version that performs fairly well and the ease of installation. We also cross-checked our results directly on Google to ensure they were accurate. Try Airlift and see if it will work to speed up your site and improve UX.