Google is constantly launching new search updates. Most of these updates are directly relevant to core web vitals. For those of you who are not sure what is ‘core web vitals’ by Google, it is the speedcore metrics.
Google has said that it will start to rank websites that are fast, easier to load, and offer a smooth user experience to visitors.
In the coming year, Google will automatically start to rank websites for speed and quality. What this means for webmasters is, if they still haven’t optimized their websites for speed, they are soon going to lose rankings.
If you want to improve your site rankings and speed up your WordPress website, then this article is for you. Let’s learn about the best cache plugins for WordPress that you can have on your website to speed up your WordPress website.
Why is Cache Important?
A website cache is a temporary storage where the most visited pages of a website are stored by the server. When people visit a website, they request the page from the server.
The server has to check what information the person requested and then create a dynamic page about it. The server then sends that page to the user. All this process takes a lot of time and the page load time increases.
When a cache system is used, the server doesn’t have to send the dynamic page to the user. Instead, when a query is generated, the cache is checked.
If the page is available in the cache, it is sent to the user and the request is served. So, cache decreases the time to first byte (TTFB), decreases DOM load, and improves page performance.
WordPress offers a lot of cache options to users through its many plugins available. That’s what we are going to discuss in this article.
Best Cache Plugins for WordPress: Which One Should You Use?
We will discuss the best cache plugins for WordPress that you can add to your website for a quick gain in speed and performance.
First on our list is WP Rocket. WP Rocket is known as the fastest cache plugin for WordPress in the market. It is easy to install and manage.
You can download the free version of WP Rocket directly from the WordPress plugin store. However, if you are looking for more functionality, then your best bet would be to purchase the WP Rocket plugin.
The price of a single license of WP Rocket is close to $49 as of the writing of this article. However, you can buy a plugin for three sites at once at a total cost of $99.
That’s great for people who have multiple websites running. Or, for agencies that are trying to optimize the websites of their clients and need a quick solution to manage website cache.
In initial tests, WP Rocket has decreased the time of page loading by 1.30 seconds. That is a 30% gain in website performance.
We couldn’t mention Nitropack in our list. Nitropack has proven time and time again that is the fastest cache plugin available in the market.
It is not a cache plugin that minimizes your website JS & HTML, removes scripts, and adds lazy loading. But, it is a plugin that mirrors your site image to its servers.
What this means is that when a person visits your website, he/she will see your website page directly from Nitropack.
You must be wondering what is the benefit of Nitropack? Well, consider this: Your website has a page load time of 8 seconds.
This page time is just too much for a visitor to spend while the site loads. So, that visitor will probably bounce off to another website.
Now, let’s say that your website has Nitropack installed. With this plugin, your website will load from the Nitropack server.
The nitropack server will load from it in less than 3 seconds. It means that more people will start visiting your website and not bounce back. As a result, your profits increase, and your websites start performing well!
W3 Total Cache is another popular cache plugin that you can use for WordPress performance gains. This can be declared by the fact that W3 Total Cache is installed on over a million websites and still has a five stars rating. In fact, top technology news websites such as Smashing Mag, Mashable, Make Use Of, and various others use W3 Total Cache as their website cache plugin.
On average, W3 Total Cache improves the website performance by 30% and improves the overall website loading experience. It can also add lazy loading, manage DOM loading, and site scripts.
Tests on the Pingdom speed testing plugin have shown that the W3 Total cache has reduced over 1.06 seconds of the loading time and improved site performance by 29.16%.
WP Super Cache is next in our list of cache plugins for WordPress. It is not only a powerful cache plugin contender but has proven its mettle time and time again.
WP Super Cache is quite similar to WP Total Cache in terms of its working. It offers the same features such as JS, HTML, and CSS minification, lazy loading, page compression, rebuilding site cache, and CDN support. However, what makes Super Cache easy to install and use is its options.
Site administrators can easily install and manage it without a problem. It also offers an expert mode for people who are well-versed in WordPress site management.
They can operate their controls through coding. Since WP Super Cache is developed by Automattic, the developer behind WordPress core, you can rest assured that this plugin will be of great value to you and your readers.
Another great plugin that you can use for WordPress site caching is the Breeze plugin. The plugin is low-key and still growing but it comes with an active support team.
It is developed by Cloudways and is part of their core WordPress installation. It is still available on the WordPress plugins section so if you are looking to move from your current cache plugin to Breeze, then do give it a try. Breeze offers two versions. Manual & Automatic.
In the manual version, you control website cache optimization and site performance. In the automated version, you can let Breeze decide what type of changes you need on your website. Try both and see which version suits you best.
Next on our list is Autoptimize, another great best cache plugin for WordPress that you can add to your website to improve site performance.
It is a clear WordPress script and code minification plugin with over a million downloads. The Autoptimize plugin is perfect for all those who are looking for a lightweight, autonomous plugin to clear their site cache. With Autoptimize, they can easily improve site performance without tinkering with the code.
LiteSpeed cache is built by Litespeed server and is also a part of their offering. It is another great cache plugin that minifies codes and scripts, compresses images and assets, adds lazy loading, and enables CDN by LiteSpeed on the website. However, the CDN option is only available in the paid version of the cache plugin.
SG Optimizer Cache is another WordPress caching plugin that you can use on your WordPress website to improve site performance.
It is easy to set up and doesn’t require complex configuration to cache content. It offers a separate cache for both mobile and desktop systems and that makes it a lot faster than many other caches available on the market.
SG Optimizer has over a million downloads and is soon becoming the fastest downloadable cache plugin on WordPress. You can download the lite version to get started.
Comet Cache is an old cache plugin but it is still used by many WordPress users for improving their site performance. Comet cache is easy to set up because it doesn’t ask for a lot of options.
It works by creating a snapshot of your whole website and then fulfilling user requests through that image. The cache can be purged with a single click.
Comet cache also offers a dashboard where you can manage the advanced settings of the cache plugin. It also offers minification, header expiration, and caching of 404 requests as well.
The cache plugin is not under direct maintenance by its team. But the free version can be installed directly from the WordPress plugin directory.
Next on our list is the Cachify WordPress plugin that helps improve site performance, reduce the load on the server, and improve page load time.
Cachify has been rated as one of the best cache plugins by its reviewers. As of now, it has over 10,000 active installs and is continuously gaining momentum.
Cachify can be installed as a multi-site cache plugin and it enhances speed that can be seen through performance optimization tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom, and many others.
Nginx is another caching plugin that is growing steadily for the last few years. It has over 9,000 active installs and it is actively maintained by a team of developers.
Nginx automatically optimizes the content of websites to deliver it to the target audience quickly. Nginx requires core access to write directly to WordPress function-core though. It is an open-source cache, and users can easily optimize it or build upon it to make their own custom cache solution.
Although Cloudflare is a CDN service that WordPress users can install on their websites, it is also a cache solution. In fact, Cloudflare CDN + cache service directly boosts website performance.
It also offers a dashboard to both free and paid users where they can see the performance of their websites, the bottlenecks that occur at a consistent speed, and suggestions to solve those bottlenecks easily. Cloudflare CDN and cache service are available for free for 20GB of data per month. However, if you want a full-site cache service, then you will need to buy the Cloudflare CDN premium service.
Cloudflare offers easy installation. You just have to create an account on Cloudflare, install the plugin on your WordPress website, and the guided tutorial will connect your website to the Cloudflare servers.
FAQs about WordPress Cache Plugins
Do I Need a WordPress Cache Plugin?
Yes, even if your website is performing well you can still improve its performance by adding a good cache plugin to your website. Our recommendations are to go with Nitropack, Cloudflare, or WP Rocket if you want a direct increase in site performance.
Which WordPress Plugin Should I Choose?
You can choose any good WordPress cache plugin to improve your site performance. Every cache plugin has a unique selling point. Read the reviews of all the top ones and then decide.
What are Free WordPress Cache Plugins?
Almost all paid plugins have a lite version available that you can directly download from the WordPress plugin directory. In the list we provided above, you can also find a couple of great plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Nitropack, and Cloudflare that have a lite version available. Simply install this lite version on your WordPress website and you are good to go. If you think that you want a paid version for your site’s performance, then you can buy the premium package of the plugin.
That’s all you need to know about the WordPress cache plugins.
We have listed all the top WordPress plugins that you can use on your website to improve website performance, keep website health in check, and ensure core web vitals are properly optimized.
