Caching is the process of storing data so that it can be retrieved more quickly. When web browsers make requests for web pages, the browser will remember what was requested in the past and store it in a local cache.
That is why WordPress Cache plugins are essential for optimizing and increasing the speed of your website or blog.
Caching plugins are necessary for websites as caching will reduce load time by storing copies of files locally on your computer or server. These files can then be quickly served up to users instead of generating them from scratch every time a user visits your site.
If you're looking for the best cache plugins for your WordPress website, you're at the right place.
In this article, I have highlighted and compared some of the best WordPress cache plugins that can boost your website speed and improve your Core Web Vitals which is an important ranking factor on search engines.
Let's get started.
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Best WordPress Cache Plugins
1. WP Rocket
What is WP Rocket?
WP Rocket is one of the best and most popular cache plugin for WordPress websites. It takes control of the page load process. In this way, it can dramatically increase the speed of your WordPress site.
The some of the main benefits of WP Rocket are:
- It doesn't use any server resources.
- Easy to install and configure with many options for advanced configurations, for example choosing a CDN or using compression.
- It has a low memory usage, so it does not slow down your site and HTTP requests are more quickly served by the server.
- It caches content and static files to reduce bandwidth usage, which results in faster loading times and lower costs from your hosting company.
- You can exclude certain pages from being cached if you don't want them to be fast load times all the time.
- You can customize the settings of WP Rocket according to your needs with very little coding knowledge
Key Features of WP Rocket
WP Rocket Pricing
WP Rocket offers three pricing plans - Single ($49/year for 1 site), Plus ($99/year for 3 sites) and Infinite ($249/year) for unlimited websites.
It doesn't offer a free trial, however, all the three paid plans comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee. If you feel that WP Rocket cache plugin is not able to speed up your website, you can claim 100% refund within the 14-day period.
In a Nutshell: WP Rocket is great for people who are just getting started with WordPress and have little or no experience in using cache plugins. Once you installed and activate WP Rocket, it automatically activates 80% of the popular speed optimization settings. This speeds up your site which will result in better user experience as well as higher rankings in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Get started with WP Rocket with the link given below.
2. LiteSpeed Cache
What is LiteSpeed Cache?
With more than 2 million+ active installations on WordPress websites across the globe, the LiteSpeed plugin is one of the most popular cache plugin with 1300+ 5 star rating on WordPress.org.
It is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin that offers speed optimization features like minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, generate cricital CSS automatically, defer JavaScript loading, lazy load images and more.
You can download and install the free and and open source LiteSpeed cache plugin from WordPress.org to speed up your website speed.
Below I have mentioned some of the main benefits of using LiteSpeed Cache plugin:
- It improves page-load speed and performance by caching static files throughout the site and reduce the overall load on caching servers.
- It make websites load faster by storing static resources (data) in browser's cache.
- It minimizes the number of HTTP requests made to the web server and reduces latency.
- It also helps keep frequently accessed pages in memory for quicker access and reduces disk I/O operations.
- It offers QUIC.cloud CDN for Image Optimization, CSS Optimization and Low Quality Image Placeholder services.
Key Features of LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache Pricing
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for WordPress is free. You can download it from WordPress.org. When you install the plugin on your site, most of the default settings are automatically applied to speed up your site.
In a Nutshell: LiteSpeed Cache Plugin is one of the most popular free plugin. It accelerates your site, improves SEO and load time, and also optimizes your WordPress. Get started with LiteSpeed Cache with the link given below.
What is W3 Total Cache?
W3 Total Cache is a free WordPress cache plugin that reduces the load on your web server. This can improve your site performance by caching static files, browsers request for HTML content more often than dynamic files so caching will help to reduce the server load.
It can be installed and configured in two minutes and it has a rich set of features that are used to fine-tune how web pages display on the visitor’s browser - everything from making database queries faster to increasing page display speed on mobile browsers.
The easy-to-use interface helps you easily manage how pages are cached and what data is sent out to visitors' browsers.
Here are some of the key benefits of using W3 Total cache plugin on your site:
- Speed up the loading speed of pages, posts and static files.
- Increase site's SEO visibility by getting rid of duplicate content on the site.
- Improve mobile browsing experience for visitors who visit your site from their mobile devices.
- Reduce server load and bandwidth usage when your website has many visitors at once.
Key Features of W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache Pricing
An annual subscription of W3 Total Cache Pro will cost you $99. Apart from the above features, the Pro Plan gives you additional features like caching statistics diagnose previously unknown performance issues with your site, full site delivery to load your site at lightning fast speeds, Rest API caching and more.
In a Nutshell: Unlike WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache is available for free. It is one of the best free cache plugin for WordPress website. If you're a beginner, you can try the free version which you can upgrade later to the Pro version. Get started with W3 Total Cache with the link given below.
How to Choose the Right WordPress Cache Plugin
Here are some of the best tips that may help you in selecting the right WordPress cache plugin:
- User Interface: The interface should be simple and easy to use so that a non-technical person can easily setup the basic optimization settings.
- Minification: The cache plugin should minify the CSS and JavaScript files. It helps in reducing the web page size.
- Browser cache: Browser caching is essential for a good browsing experience because it prevents loading of pages from scratch. In other words, browsers cache web pages to make sure that they can be quickly loaded and displayed in future visits to the website.
- Defer JavaScript: JavaScript code on your web page can slow down your website significantly. Enabling Defer JavaScript option can boost the loading speed of your site. It improve your two Core Web Vitals metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP – measures loading performance) and First Input Delay (FID – measures interactivity).
- Lazy Loading: If you use lots of images on your site, it can impact the loading speed of your web pages. If your cache plugins supports Lazy Loading, you can enable to display images only when your web page has been loaded.
- Compatibility: The WordPress cache plugin you're using must be compatible with the popular themes, plugins and page builders.
Wrapping Up
If you want to reduce your website load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores, then using the best WordPress cache plugin is a must.
In this article, I have covered only the best and the most used cache plugin. I would recommend you to use WP Rocket as it is beginner-friendly. It automatically applies 80% of the popular optimization settings required to speed up a website.
However, if you don't want to spend on a cache plugin, then LiteSpeed Cache could be the best choice for you.
Which cache plugin you like the most? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below.
