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Do you want to increase the speed of your WordPress site? Using a caching plugin on your website is one of the best ways to ensure your website loads faster.
Statistically speaking, almost half of your site's audience expects your site to load in less than 3 seconds. So it's no surprise that Google continues to emphasise site speed in its search algorithm. The higher the page speed, the better your search ranking and the more organic traffic you can attract.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress caching plugins for your website.
Why do you need a WordPress caching plugin?
A caching plugin generates static HTML pages from your website and saves them on your server.
Whenever a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to dramatically improve your page load time.
Let's take a look at the best WordPress caching plugins available on the market.
WP ROCKET
WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress. The ease of configuration is what sets WP Rocket apart from its competitors. Once the plugin is activated, page caching will be enabled immediately.
Some other advantages of using WP Rocket are :
- The indexing of your site on search engines will be improved.
- To improve page loading time, HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.
- Lazy loading is applied to your images, which means that your images are only loaded when they are visible to your visitors on their browser.
- It comes with many hooks that allow developers to easily extend its functionality.
Price: From 49 $ for a single site licence.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another popular caching plugin for WordPress, with over a million active installations. The plugin is managed by Automattic, the same team as WordPress.com.
WP Super Cache helps you generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After processing relatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts on your site, WP Super Cache serves the static HTML file to the vast majority of your website visitors.
WP Super Cache serves cached files in 3 ways:
- Simple: This is the most recommended method of file caching as you do not need to edit the PHP files, plus the .htaccess file does not need to be configured.
- Expert: This is the fastest caching method for serving super-cached HTML files to users, but requires modification of your .htaccess files.
- WP Super Caching: This method is used to cache pages for known users (those who log in to your site, leave comments, etc.) Although this is the most flexible caching method, it is slightly slower than the other methods.
Price: Free
W3 Total Cache
With over a million active installations, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It improves your server performance by caching all aspects of your site and also offers content delivery network integrations.
It has been used and recommended by countless companies and publications such as AT&T, MattCutts.com, Mashable.com, and many others. Whether your site is hosted on a shared hosting network or on a dedicated server, you'll find the plugin useful for improving your web server performance and reducing page load times. Currently, it is the only plugin designed to optimize all practical hosting environments.
It supports Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL).
The developers claim that the plugin can offer up to 80% of bandwidth savings through minification, the process of reducing the size of your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and streams without having a negative impact.
Price: Free
WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache comes with fewer configuration settings for WordPress caching, making it one of the easiest WordPress caching plugins available in the official WordPress plugin repository.
Like any other caching plugin, it creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress site.
To reduce file size, the plugin minifies HTML and CSS files. It also allows you to disable emojis on your site. It effectively implements browser caching to reduce page load times for regular visitors and combines multiple CSS files into one to reduce the number of HTTP round trips.
The premium version of the plugin comes with many unique features to increase the speed of your page, such as image optimization, database cleanup, mobile caching, and much more.
After installing the free WP Fastest Cache plugin, you can purchase the premium version directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Price: Both free and premium versions are available. The price is hidden from the website and can be seen after you click on the purchase button integrated in your free plugin.
Comet Cache
Comet Cache is another popular caching plugin with 60,000 active installations. Unlike other caching plugins, Comet Cache also offers the ability to cache logged-in users. This means that if you are running a membership site, an e-commerce site or any other site that requires users to register, then Comet Cache is a must-have plugin for you.
The plugin uses browser caching with the Apache server, which means you can increase the speed of the page by avoiding multiple round trips between the server and the browser.
You can also serve all cached files on your site from the content delivery network (CDN) of your choice. It supports popular CDNs like CloudFront, MaxCDN, and more.
To avoid generating a new cache version when your server is busy, the plugin monitors the server load and temporarily disables cache expiration.
The plugin also shows you the cache statistics to help you better understand the state of your site's cache.
Price: Free and premium versions are available. A single site licence can be purchased for a one-off fee of 39 $.
Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a lightweight caching plugin that creates a static HTML file of your site and serves it to the vast majority of your website visitors on demand. It requires minimal configuration and comes with all the important features you will need from a caching plugin.
Unlike most free WordPress caching plugins, Cache Enabler provides extensive documentation that helps you explore the various features of the plugin. With beautiful screenshots and videos, the documentation will guide you through the different aspects of WordPress caching.
It is in your best interest not to use mobile-specific themes or plugins that show different layouts for mobile and desktop users with Cache Enabler as this will bypass the cache, rendering it useless.
Price: Free
Hyper Cache
Hyper Cache is a pure PHP caching plugin that can be used in both low-cost hosting environments and on high-end servers.
Enabling Hyper Cache is easy as it works with a set of default values.
The plugin comes with a mobile theme switch option that allows you to enable caching even if you are using different templates for mobile and desktop users. This is handy if you are using a responsive theme on your site or if you need different ad formats for different devices.
Another unique advantage of Hyper Cache is its ability to serve cached pages for commenting on authors. However, you can also disable the service of cached pages to comment on authors if you wish.
It is also a bbPress ready plugin, so you can enable caching for your bbPress forum pages.
Price: Free
Choosing the best WordPress caching plugin for your needs
When it comes to choosing a WordPress caching plugin for your site, there is no "one size fits all" solution.
If you want to choose the best free WordPress caching plugin that does the job, then choose W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Both are constantly updated and are used by over a million websites.
If you need a premium WordPress caching solution that offers exceptional support and requires minimal configuration on your end, choose WP Rocket notice.
We hope this guide has helped you choose the best caching plugin for your website. Good luck speeding up your site!
If you also want to increase your organic traffic, take a look at the best WordPress SEO tools.
