The current pandemic is hitting hard most countries in the world forcing millions of people to be in quarantine. Even though it can be boring sometimes, the truth is that it’s the perfect time to learn something new. So why not have a look at some tools to freshen up and optimize your site speed. Today, we’ll show you the best caching plugins for WordPress to speed up your website.
Why do you need caching plugins to speed up your WordPress site?
Nowadays, there are millions and millions of websites on the internet so it’s not easy to stand out from your competitors. Apart from having a professional-looking theme and posting great content, Google prioritizes as a ranking factor so your site needs to load fast. But how fast? Speed is a very specialized aspect that needs special care. To better understand this topic, let’s have a look at some figures:
- 47% of users expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less
- 40% of visitors leave a site if the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds
- If page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increase 32%
As you can see, visitors aren’t willing to wait if your site is slow so you must make sure that it’s lightning-fast. You may think that it’s not possible to load a site in 2 seconds or less, especially if there are many images. However, the good news is that it’s possible.
In this post, we’ll introduce to you a collection of the best caching plugins for WordPress to speed up your website.
Best WordPress Caching Plugins to Speed up your Website
The best WordPress caching plugins are:
- WP Rocket
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- Perfmatters
- WP-Optimize
- WP Super Cache
- WP Smush Pro
- Clearfy
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the most famous caching plugins for WordPress and it’s used by more than 1 million sites. Apart from having outstanding features, it has an excellent user-friendly interface that makes it easy to set up and use even for users with no coding knowledge.
The best about WP Rocket is that not only is it an excellent tool to speed up your site but also to improve its overall performance. This premium plugin comes with many fantastic features such as image lazy loading (the images load only when the user scrolls down), GZIP compression, database optimization to remove bloat, browser caching, minification to reduce the size of the files, and many more.
But that’s not all. WP Rocket’s main features are:
- Minifies CSS, HTML, and Javascript files
- Page caching
- CDN integrated
- Host Google Analytics code
- Image lazy loading
- Database optimization
- Direct Cloudflare
- CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- And many more!
Price
WP Rocket is a premium plugin that has 3 plans that start at 39 USD per year for a single site and 1 year of support. If you want a top caching tool, this is probably your best choice.
2. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is another top caching plugin for WordPress that you should consider. It’s not simply a tool to speed up your site but an all-in-one performance plugin. It works based on the principle of increasing site performance and decreasing loading times by tweaking features such as CDN and improving SEO and user experience.
Even though it’s not the easiest tool to set up, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular WordPress caching addons and it has more than 3,000 5-star reviews in the WordPress library.
So what does this tool have to get so many golden stars? Some of its main features are:
- Shared hosting compatibility
- Transparent CDN management
- Full mobile support
- Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML as well as posts, pages, and RSS feeds
- Various caching: pages and posts, CSS and JavaScript, feeds, search result pages, and more
- Extension framework for Cloudflare, WPML customization
- AMP and SSL support
- And more
The only con of this plugin is that unlike WPRocket, W3 Total Cache is harder to set up and use so it’ll take more time and effort to learn how to make the most of it.
Price
W3 Total Cache is free so you can have one of the best caching plugins for WordPress without spending a cent.
3. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is another excellent tool that focuses on caching to help you speed up your site. This plugin has a cache system that creates static HTML files and prevents page rendering, which improves page load time and SEO rankings since site speed is one of the elements that Google considers for search rankings.
With more than 1 million active installations, WP Fastest Cache is one of the most famous caching tools out there.
Some of its main functionalities include:
- Easy set-up procedure
- Minify CSS and HTML
- One-click clearing of cache
- The ability to set expiration times for all post/pages
- CDN integration
Additionally, WP Fastest Cache is easy to set up and use and has many interesting features making it one of the best caching plugins for WordPress.
Price
And the best part is that this plugin is 100% free!
4. Perfmatters
The creators of Perfmatters did a brilliant job in terms of “thinking out of the box” when developing this tool. While most of the other plugins focus on building up and improving site performance and speed, Perfmatters concentrates on solving the roots of the problem first. By default, WordPress gives you several options that might slow down your site so Perfmatters helps you deactivate these plugins, while also disabling unnecessary HTTP requests that will slow down the rendering of your web pages.
So instead of building things up, this excellent tool tends to tear things down. And that’s why it’s regarded as one of the best caching plugins for WordPress.
Some of its main features include:
- Easy dashboard: The dashboard’s one-click toggles will make it easy to use even for newbies.
- No Javascript needed: This plugin is extremely lightweight. It weighs under 50kb and doesn’t use JavaScript on the frontend.
- Support team with more than 19 years of experience
- Compatibility with all themes and plugins
- Reduces HTTP requests by stripping out code, and minimizing back-end load
Pro tip: If you use Perfmatters alongside other caching plugins, you will double its effectiveness. Try installing it along with another caching plugin listed here and see how your site’s speed improves.
Price
Perfmatters has 3 premium plans and is available from 24.95 USD per year for 1 site.
5. WP-Optimize
Similar to Perfmatters, WP-Optimize has a different approach to most caching plugins for WordPress. While the first one disables unneeded options, the latter works to clean up your database and cache your site. A database cluttered with junk data is one of the utmost reasons for slow websites so it’s wise to keep it clean. Even though this is something you could do on your own, WP-Optimize helps you do it in no time.
After installed and activated, WP-Optimize will scan around your database to delete the unused information and, as a result, it will speed up your site. Apart from that, it also:
- Compacts MySQL tables
- Do automatic clean-ups regularly
- Keep safe the chosen data during clean-ups
- Compress images: bulk and big files compression
- Cache pre-loading
- Gzip compression
Just like Perfmatters, WP-Optimize can work great alongside other plugins.
Price
WP-Optimize is a freemium plugin. There are 4 versions: a free one and 3 premium plans that start at 39 USD/year.
6. WP Super Cache
With more than 2 million active installations, WP Super Cache is one of the most famous caching plugins for WordPress. Not only it comes with plenty of great features but it’s also easy to set up.
To help you speed up your blog, WP Super Cache generates static HTML files and serves the users with those files instead of processing the PHP scripts.
This plugin’s main features are:
- Support for multiple caching types
- Cache preload
- Ability to serve static HTML files
- CDN support
- Gzip compression
All in all, WP Super Cache is an excellent caching plugin suitable for both starters and advanced users. It comes with good features and it’s easy to set up making it one of the most popular tools to speed up your site.
Price
Apart from having awesome features, WP Super Cache is free.
7. WP Smush Pro
Apart from junk data, HTTP requests, and PHP scripts, images can also slow down your website. WP Smush Pro focuses on optimizing the images so it stands out as one of the best plugins to speed up WordPress sites. This tool helps you compress, optimize, and easily resize your images.
Some of its main functionalities include:
- Lazy load
- Bulk optimize for 50 images within a click
- Automatic resizing of your images to pre-set dimensions
- Large images detection
- Extensive backups of original images (premium version)
- Multiple compression options (premium version)
Price
Another interesting thing about WP Smush Pro is that it offers two different versions depending on the website’s needs. There’s a free version that lets you compress images smaller than 5 MB and three premium plans that start at 7 USD per month (or 70 USD per year) and allow you to optimize images up to 32 MB.
8. Clearfy
Clearfy is an excellent caching plugin for WordPress that will help you disable unneeded features and optimize your site’s performance. It disables features that consume CPU and slow down your WordPress site. With more than 100,000 active installations, it’s a great tool to clear code from trash, eliminate vulnerabilities, speed up indexing of search engines, fix other plugins’ bugs, and more.
Some elements that Clearfy can disable are:
- Revisions
- Autosaves
- Comments
- Widgets
- RSS Feeds
- Gravatars
- Emojis
- Google Maps
- WordPress API from header
- RDS, Shortlink, Windows Live Writer and WordPress Generator Tag
- Pingbacks + trackbacks
- WooCommerce scripts, reviews, and Cart Fragments
Clearfy can be combined with other plugins to get an extremely optimized and secure site.
Price
The best part is that this tool is 100% free.
WordPress Caching Plugins – Conclusion
All in all, speed is a very important factor to reduce bounce rate and improve your ranking in Google. Even though you can do several things to optimize your site, we recommend installing a specific plugin to improve your site’s speed.
Each of these caching plugins for WordPress has its specialized functionality so you should choose the one that best fits your needs. Do you have many images on your site? Or should you focus on deleting junk data or disabling unnecessary features? However, if you want a complete solution and you can spend a bit of money, we recommend WPRocket. For only 39 USD per year, it’s one of the most complete tools out there. Otherwise, W3 Total Cache and WP Fastest Cache are also excellent choices.
On the other hand, if your website has a cluttered database, WP-Optimize is your best bet.
Finally, keep in mind that you can also combine any caching plugin with a specialized plugin for even better results. For example, W3 Total Cache with Clearfy could be a good solution that’s 100% free.
Do you want to improve your site with other tools? Check out the best quiz plugins and the best forum plugins for WordPress.