Interested in knowing about the 6 best cache plugins for WordPress site. Cache plugin helps your WordPress site to load faster.
WordPress is used widely throughout the world, for websites and blogs, and the wordpress community has developed a huge repository of plugins for extending its functionality.
One of the most important plugins in that repository are cache plugins. In today’s article we are going to check out, what cache plugins are and how they can be used.
Table of Contents
What Is Cache Plugin
To know what cache plugin is, we will first have to understand what cache is.
Cache is a hardware or software component that stores data temporarily, so that future requests for that data can be served faster.
The data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere.
The data stored is usually in static form.
For example, when you are browsing a page for the very first time, your computer sends a request to the server, where the data is stored and the server then sends back the requested data to your computer.
This transfer of data can take some time. If you have cache enabled on your system, this data would get stored in that cache memory temporarily,
so that when you request the same page again, rather than requesting the data from the server, the temporarily stored data in the cache will be called and displayed.
This allows the data to load faster and decrease the lag time.
In wordpress there are many plugins which can help your in caching the data . These plugins are known as cache plugins. We will have a look at a few such cache plugins.
Why Use Cache Plugins
As your website gets bigger, more and more data will be archived and the website will start to slow down. To avoid this problem and to manage your cache data, cache plugins are used.
With the help of cache plugins, you can also clear the cache memory if required, which will in turn allow your website to run faster and create a cache for new pages and posts.
6 Best Cache Plugins For WordPress Site
Below is a list of 6 best cache plugins for WordPress site. You will need to install & activate the plugins before using it. In case you don’t know how to install & activate a WordPress plugin check out our article on, how to install and activate a WordPress plugin.
W3 Total Cache
This plugin is also known as W3TC & improves the SEO & user experience of your website.
It does so by increasing the performance, reducing load times & by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
Also, It is a web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade.
W3 Total Cache is the total performance solution for optimizing your WordPress Website.
There are two ways of installing this plugin.
You can download the plugin, directly from the official website of wordpress and then upload, install & activate it in your wordpress website, or you can directly install & activate it from the plugins section of your wordpress website dashboard.
The W3TC plugin is free to use and has an overall rating of 4.3 out of 5 with 1251 votes.
WP Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog.
After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
The static HTML files will be served to the vast majority of your users, users who are not logged in, users who have not left a comment on your blog or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
99% of your visitors will be served static HTML files.
One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them.
The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways (ranked by speed):
- Expert. The fastest method is by using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “supercached” static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are “lighter”. This does require the Apache mod_rewrite module (which is probably installed if you have custom permalinks) and a modification of your .htaccess file which is risky and may take down your site if modified incorrectly.
- Simple. Supercached static files can be served by PHP and this is the recommended way of using the plugin. The plugin will serve a “supercached” file if it exists and it’s almost as fast as the mod_rewrite method. It’s easier to configure as the .htaccess file doesn’t need to be changed. You still need a custom permalink. You can keep portions of your page dynamic in this caching mode.
- WP-Cache caching. This is mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if super caching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too. This mode is always enabled but you can disable caching for known users, URLs with parameters, or feeds separately. Set the constant “DISABLE_SUPERCACHE” to 1 in your wp-config.php if you want to only use WP-Cache caching.
If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files then use simple mode. It’s easy to set up and very fast.
Recommended Settings
- Simple caching.
- Compress pages.
- Don’t cache pages for known users.
- Cache rebuild.
- CDN support.
- Extra homepage checks.
Garbage collection is the act of cleaning up cache files that are out of date and stale.
There’s no correct value for the expiry time but a good starting point is 1800 seconds.
Consider deleting the contents of the “Rejected User Agents” text box and allow search engines to cache files for you.
Preload as many posts as you can and enable “Preload Mode”. Garbage collection of old cached files will be disabled.
If you don’t care about sidebar widgets updating often set the preload interval to 2880 minutes (2 days) so all your posts aren’t reached very often.
When the preload occurs the cache files for the post being refreshed is deleted and then regenerated.
Afterwards a garbage collection of all old files is performed to clean out stale cache files.
Even with preload mode enabled cached files will still be deleted when posts are modified or comments made.
The above description is taken from the official wordpress website.
There are two ways of installing W3 Super Cache.
You can download the plugin, directly from the official website of wordpress and then upload, install & activate it in your wordpress website, or you can directly install & activate it from the plugins section of your wordpress website dashboard.
The W3TC plugin is free to use and has an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 with 4507 votes.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best plugins out there in the market. It has as array of features to improve the speed and caching of your wordpress website.
The features include, Page Caching, Cache Preloading, Static Files Compression, Images on Request, Developer Friendly.
We will see some main features in detail.
Page Caching
Caching creates an ultra-fast load time, essential for improving Search Engine Optimization and increasing conversions. When you turn on WP Rocket, page caching is immediately activated.
Cache Preloading
Because our crawler simulates a visit to preload the cache, the indexing of your website by search engines is instantly improved.
Static Files Compression
WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files through minification. Lighter files means faster load time.
Images On Request
Images are loaded only as your visitor scrolls down the page, improving the load time of the page. YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo and other major websites are using this technique. Now yours can too.
Developer Friendly
WP Rocket’s code is developed according to WordPress best practices. It is clean, commented and has loads of hooks so developers can easily make advanced customizations.
Other features include,
- Quick Setup
- Sitemap Preloading
- GZIP Compression
- Browser Caching
- Database Optimization
- Google Fonts Optimization
- Lazyload
- Minification / Concatenation
- Defer JS Loading
- Cloudflare Compatibility
- CDN
- DNS Prefetching
- Mobile Detection
- Multisite Compatibility
- eCommerce Friendly
- Multilingual Compatibility
- Connected Users
- Import/Export Functionality
The only drawback of this plugin is that its not free, but hey, if you want quality stuff then you have to pay for it. The do however have a 14 day trial policy. The pricing of the plugin is given below.
Also check out, WP Rocket WordPress Plugin Detailed Review.
WP Fastest Cache
When you render a page, PHP & MySQL is comes in play. Therefore, system needs RAM and CPU.
If many visitors come to a site, system uses lots of RAM and CPU so page is rendered so slowly.
In this case, you need a cache system not to render page again and again. Cache system generates a static html file and saves. Other users reach to static html page.
In addition, the site speed is used in Google’s search ranking algorithm so cache plugins that can improve your page load time will also improve your SEO ranking.
Setup of this plugin is so easy.
You don’t need to modify the .htaccess file. The modification is automatic.
Features
- This plugin uses Mod_Rewrite method which is the fastest
- All cache files are deleted when a post or page is published
- Admin can delete all cached files from the options page
- Admin can delete minified CSS and JS files from the options page
- Block cache for specific page or post with Short Code
- Cache Timeout – All cached files are deleted at the determinate time
- Cache Timeout for specific pages
- Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices
- Enable/Disable cache option for logged-in users
- SSL support
- CDN support
- Cloudflare support
- Preload Cache – Create the cache of all the site automatically
- Exclude pages and user-agents
There are two ways of installing W3 Fastest Cache. You can download the plugin, directly from there official website and then upload, install & activate it in your wordpress website, or you can directly install & activate it from the plugins section of your wordpress website dashboard.
Hyper Cache
This is a lite, simple to configure and highly performant cache plugin for WordPress.
Hyper Cache is specifically written to get the maximum speed for your WordPress blog.
It can be used in low resources hosting as well on high end servers.
Hyper Cache is purely PHP and works on every blog and when you deactivate it no stale settings are left around.
Features
- Mobile aware: double cache for desktop and mobile site versions
- HTTPS ready
- Mobile theme switch option: change the theme on mobile device detection
- Able to serve expired pages to bots to increase the perceived blog speed by bots
- Manages compression even on the fly for non cached pages
- Lots of configurable bypasses: matching cookies, matching urls, user agents
- Comments aware: is able to serve cached pages even to visitors who commented the blog (perfect for blog with great readers participation)
- Cache folder can be moved outside your blog space to exclude it from backups
- Controls over cache cleaning on blog events (post edited, comments)
- Auto clean to controls the cache used disk space
- CDN support
- Other special options
- Response header signature to check the working status
- bbPress specific integration
There are two ways of installing W3 Fastest Cache.
You can download the plugin, directly from there official website and then upload, install & activate it in your wordpress website, or you can directly install & activate it from the plugins section of your wordpress website dashboard.
Simple Cache
This plugin was constructed after getting frustrated with the major caching plugins available and building sites with developer-only complex caching solutions that get millions of page views per day.
Simple Cache promises the following,
- Extremely simple one-click install. There is an on-off switch. That’s it. No need to wade through 50 complicated settings.
- Simple Cache makes your site run very fast so you can handle lots of traffic.
- Extremely easy to delete. Don’t like the plugin? You can remove it, and your website won’t break.
- Easily clear the cache if you need to.
- Enable gzip compression.
You can directly install & activate plugin from the plugins section of your wordpress website dashboard.
Some Other Honorable Mentions Of Cache Plugins
Conclusion
Caching of website can tremendously increase the speed of your website and get you more viewers. You will be spoilt for the options you have of the cache plugins. Before you make up your mind, you can try a few plugins.