As you know, these days website loading speed matters a lot, if your website doesn’t load fast then there is a chance your visitors will leave your site, and it impacts on your website ranking. Even Google has clarified that page load time is one of the signals for better search engine ranking.
There are few things that help to improve your website loading speed such as using the best Web Hosting provider, the lightest and fastest WordPress theme, and a Cache plugin which will help to load your website faster and eventually it improve your website traffic too. Once your website traffic starts increasing then your website will also get a better search engine ranking.
If you already have a good web hosting and the fastest and lightest WordPress theme but looking for the best WordPress cache plugin then this article is just for you. Wait, before that, I want to explain to you and you should know what is caching and how it works.
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What Is Caching And How It Works?
Here I’ll explain to you what cache is and how it works, and why you need to install one of the WordPress caching plugins to your WordPress website. Well, caching is a web technology that helps to load your website faster than normal by converting your dynamic pages into HTML pages.
Generally, what happens if you don’t have a caching plugin in your website? When a visitor opens a page of your WordPress website at that time your site needs to load everything related to your page such as the sidebar, plugins, images, etc., from the WordPress database. To load all this stuff, the database sent several requests to the server.
So what will happen when lots of visitors visit your website at a time, your website may be down or get an error such as an error connecting the database or 500 internal server error because of getting several requests to the server at a time.
But if you have installed a WordPress caching plugin to your website then it will convert your dynamic pages into static pages. So now your visitor opens a page of your website then the database will not send the same request directly to the server but it will serve the saved static HTML page of your website.
This is the concept of caching and this is how it works. I hope after reading this now you have got a better idea about what caching is. There are numerous WordPress caching plugins available in the WordPress repository but here I have listed some of the best and top 5 WordPress caching plugins.
One thing do remember, use only one plugin at a time because more than one can conflict and it may break your website. Okay, so now without further ado let’s get started.
Best WordPress Cache Plugins – Top 5 Picks
Before you dive into the list and pick the one, first you need to make sure that your website hosting provider has its own WordPress cache plugin or not. The reason why I am telling you this is that if they have their plugin then it’ll work better than any other free plugin.
If you are using hosting like SiteGround or Cloudways then they have their own cache plugins like SG Optimizer and Breeze.
One more thing that I want to tell you is before you activate any cache plugin first run a speed test of your site on Google PageSpeed Insights. And run again after installing the cache plugin and see the result of how much difference you’ll get to see.
Here, I have also done the test by installing and activating the top 3 plugins and running the test in Google PageSpeed Insights to get to know which plugin works best for this blog.
Ok so now let’s back to the topic and let’s have a look at the top 5 WordPress caching plugins.
1. LiteSpeed Cache
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin which is developed by LiteSpeed Technologies has 4+ million downloads, which is a highly downloaded plugin in this list. On top of that, it has got 5-star user ratings too.
This plugin offers you numerous optimization features along with an exclusive server-level cache that helps to level up your WordPress website performance.
Many of you might be thinking about what is a server-level cache, am I right? Well, server-level cache works and processes the tasks faster than the browser cache, which significantly helps to improve your website page load time. There are very few plugin that offers server-side caching and this is one of them.
What’s more, what makes it different from the other plugins in this list? Well, apart from the common caching features like minify, combine, CDN support, etc. It also offers features features like Generating Critical CSS automatically, Responsive image placeholders, Load CSS Asynchronously, and Defer/Delay JS loading.
These options improve your WordPress website’s PageSpeed Insights score. Usually, these options are available in pro plugins but LiteSpeed offers you in free plugin.
Apart from this, it is compatible with almost all the popular plugins such as Yoast, WooCommerece, bbPress, etc. Overall, this LiteSpeed is the best cache plugin for WordPress which offers you numerous options that you can’t get with any other free plugin.
Google PageSpeed Insights Score using this Plugin With Some Basic Settings
2. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize cache plugin is a great plugin that offers amazing features in its free version. This plugin is developed by the Updraft team which is a well-known name in the WordPress industry. Like, the above plugin, it also has 1+ million downloads with 5-star user ratings.
Actually, there are very few who suggest this plugin but personally, I like this plugin and its features as I am using this cache plugin for this blog.
Let’s talk about what features they offer with this free plugin. This is not just a cache plugin, it is more than that as it caches your WordPress website, cleans your WordPress website database, and compresses your images too. When these three features are enabled with cache such as minify, database optimization, and image compression, the page speed you will get is can’t get with any other plugin.
Speaking about these features in detail what it does:
- Cleans Database: When we add posts, pages, images, plugins, themes, comments, and many other thing, WordPress stores all the things in a database even if you remove them. So, to remove that unnecessary data which is saved in a database, the WP-Optimize Cache plugin cleans up all the unnecessary data from the database tables.
- Cache: Under this tab, you’ll get an option like Cache Preloading that helps to ensure the cache is always loaded and ready. Next, Gzip compression, it reduces the website page load time by loading the Gzip compression of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Gzip compression along with cache will improve the overall performance and “first contentful paint” in the Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Minify: In this option, you’ll get the Minification option for CSS and JavaScript. Along with that, it also has a Deferring option that loads the non-critical assets once the main page loads. Minification with Deffereing CSS and JavaScript improves the page speed and also makes happy to Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Compress Images: As we all know if we have added a large image on our website, it is often one of the biggest culprits in slowing down our website’s load time. So, to make this thing done WP-Optimize cache plugin has an in-buit image-compression option. It compresses your large image by using cutting-edge lossy compression techniques and saves it into the image library.
So, these are the features which you’ll get with this plugin. The only thing that is missing in this plugin is “Image Lazy Load“, they have provided this option in their pro version.
Google PageSpeed Insights Score using this Plugin With Some Basic Settings
3. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. At the time of writing this post, it has 1+ million downloads with a 4.5-star user rating. The W3 Total Cache plugin is recommended by the most popular web hosting providers in the industry such as SiteGround, Bluehost, and Hostgator.
This W3TC plugin improves your WordPress website’s overall performance, page load times, and mainly Google Core Web Vitals. On top of that, if you are using CDN then there is a good news for you, it has an integrated CDN option so you can easily configure it with this plugin.
In addition, the W3 Total Cache plugin has an option called Extention where you can activate the Cloudflare extension and Reauthorize your account from your WordPress dashboard. Now, you can manage your Cloudflare account through this dashboard very easily. By using this W3 Total Cache plugin and Cloudflare together, you’ll get the best result in Google PageSpeed Insights.
After activating the plugin, if you can’t get it how to configure W3 Total Cache with Cloudflare then check this guide where you can get step by step guide to configure it properly.
Once you installed and activated the plugin, you can be able to see the Performance tab in your WordPress dashboard. So now if you want to configure the plugin you need to click on the Performance -> General Settings.
One thing you need to know about this plugin is that the plugin settings page offers you numerous options to configure the plugin as per requirement. But the default setting of this plugin also works well if you don’t have much knowledge about configuring the settings.
With this plugin, you’ll get all the options that you can see in the above image. The W3 Total Cache plugin surely helps to reduce the load on your server, which is very good for your website to run even after getting high traffic. Apart from this, W3 Total Cache works well with almost all servers such as VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, and Shared hosting.
Google PageSpeed Insights Score using this Plugin With Some Basic Settings
4. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is also another popular WordPress caching plugin which is developed by Automatic who is well known in the WordPress industry. If you don’t know about Automatic then you may heard about the Jetpack plugin, well both plugin is built by them.
Similar to the W3 Total Cache plugin this WP Super Cache plugin also has 1+ million downloads with a 4.5 user rating.
This plugin comes with 2 types of cache options which are PHP, and Mod_rewrite. Mod_Rewrite is an advanced and fastest caching technique. To use this Mod_Rewrite caching, it requires the Apache mod_rewrite module and also requires to modify the .htaccess file of your website.
After installing and activating the plugin you will be able to configure the plugin by clicking on Settings -> WP Super Cache. Once you activate the plugin you can see the Easy tab to configure the plugin at the basic level. But if you have knowledge then you can configure the plugin at the advanced level by clicking on the Advanced tab. So configure the plugin according to your knowledge.
The user interface of this plugin is different from the other cache plugins, it gives you minimal options. Like, you don’t get options like other plugins such as minify, page cache, database cache, object cache, etc., with this plugin.
But still, it comes under one of the best caching plugins for WordPress that can boost your site loading speed.
This plugin also supports CDN so if you are using CDN then you can configure your CDN setting by clicking on the CDN tab.
The Contents tab will show you the statistics of cache and while the Preload tab gives you the option to cache all the posts and pages of your website. Normally the cache plugin creates lots of files in your server, so here I suggest you preload only to your latest content.
5. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is the simplest caching plugin for WordPress. Like the other caching plugin WP Fastest Cache plugin also converts your dynamic WordPress pages into static HTML files.
Once you install and activate the plugin you can easily able to access this plugin by clicking on the WP Fastest Cache tab on your WordPress dashboard. The best thing about this plugin is that it comes with basic setting options and you just need to enable those options such as the Cache, Minify HTML, Minify CSS, etc., which anyone can easily understand.
Setting up this plugin is so easy that any newbie can do that. Also, you don’t need to modify the .htaccess or any other file like the WP Super Cache plugin, it will be modified automatically.
Final Thoughts
Finally, we are reached at the end of this article. I hope that after going through this article, you can able to understand what is cache and how it works. Also how it helps to improve your WordPress website performance and make Google PageSpeed Insights happy!
Above all the five plugins are the most popular and best caching plugins for WordPress. If you ask me which is my favorite plugin then I’ll go with the WP-Optmize and LiteSpeed cache plugins. As I have already said I’ve been using the WP-Optimize for this blog.
So, now it’s your turn to let me know in the comment box which plugin you liked the most.
