10 Best WordPress Plugins to Speed Up Your Website
57% of visitors will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load –
Therefore, it is already clear that website speed is essential to your user experience.
There are several easy ways to speed up your WordPress website, such as, optimizing your images , purchasing a CDN service, and the main topic of this article, a WordPress caching plugin.
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to optimize your WordPress site traffic, caching information is one of the first solutions.
First, we’ll define what caching is and why it’s important. Then, we’ll look at some plugins that can simplify and even make the process easier for you.
Before I mention recommended cache plugins , here are a few important topics:
What is caching ?
Caching is the process of saving and storing static copies of your website files in a temporary storage location. This allows a web page to be sent more quickly to your website visitor’s browser.
To fully understand the benefits of caching, let’s review what happens when a visitor sees your site for the first time.
When a visitor visits a page on your website, their browser sends a request to the server hosting your website, requesting the various components of your website—including HTML files, CSS style sheets, JavaScript, images, and more. Your server then constructs these resources and sends them back to the user’s browser, resulting in a web page displayed on their screen.
If your website uses caching, some of the information from your website’s web pages will be stored locally on the user’s device. The next time a user visits a page on your website, some of that information will be retrieved from their computer’s local storage instead of from your web server.
As you might have guessed, getting data from a cache is faster than retrieving it from a remote web server.
Additionally, by caching your website, your server uses fewer resources to load a web page, which in turn reduces Time to First Byte (TTFB)
TTFB is the amount of time it takes for a browser to send a request to the server until it receives its first bit. This will improve your overall website performance.
How do you configure caching in WordPress?
While many websites use caching to improve performance,
The WordPress CMS does not include caching functionality in its core suite.
Your hosting provider may enable caching for your site (in which case you may not be able to install any or all caching plugins). If not, you can enable caching yourself.
While you can manually set up caching on your WordPress site, this will require you to add code to your cache.php file or create a SQL query. If you don’t have the technical experience with either method, the easier alternative is to use a WordPress plugin.
Let’s check out some of the best caching plugins available below:
The best WordPress caching plugins
The best WordPress caching plugins will allow you to quickly and easily cache your posts and pages. Below is a collection of premium, free WordPress caching plugins that do just that.
- WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that offers a robust range of features. In addition to offering preloading caching and GZIP compression, this plugin allows users to minify and combine CSS and JS files, lazy load images, eliminate render-blocking JavaScript resources, remove unused CSS, and schedule automatic database cleanups. It’s the perfect solution for optimizing your Core Web Vitals scores and making your site faster in just a few clicks.
It is also optimized for e-commerce sites so that it automatically removes the “Cart”, “Checkout”, and “My Account” pages from the cache to prevent interruption of the purchase process.
What sets WP Rocket apart from other speed optimization plugins is that it starts working right away as soon as it’s installed and activated on your site.
But from the perspective of Host Center and our extensive experience in the field, we are less likely to recommend this plugin because it brings with it many glitches in the WordPress system.
2. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is the highest-rated caching plugin in the official WordPress directory. The free version of WP Fastest Cache offers a variety of advanced features. With this plugin, webmasters can delete all cached files, minified CSS and JS files, or schedule their deletion at a specific time. They can also enable or disable the caching option for mobile devices and logged-in users – all by checking a box on the settings page.
Unlike other free caching plugins like W3 Total Cache , this plugin doesn’t just minify HTML and CSS files – it combines them to make your code cleaner and your web pages faster.
The premium version offers even more functionality, including JavaScript file minification, eliminating render-blocking JavaScript resources, and lazy loading.
3. LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache is another five-star caching plugin in the WordPress library.
It can minify and combine CSS and JavaScript files, lazy loading of images, automatic image optimization, and more.
What sets LiteSpeed Cache apart from other plugins is that it is a server-level cache, which is faster than PHP-level caching. So while the plugin is free, it does require you to use the LiteSpeed web server for its built-in page caching features.
Page caching can bypass PHP and database queries, and use cookies to display multiple versions of cached content based on the user’s device, geographic location, and currency. You will need to pay a small monthly fee to purchase a license to use this server.
4. WP- Optimize
WP-Optimize is another five-star caching plugin in the WordPress directory with over a million active installations. You can configure the plugin settings to instruct client browsers to reuse cache resources, compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and minify and defer CSS and JavaScript to reduce the size and number of requests to your server.
You can also check a box to create separate files for mobile devices to ensure an optimized version of your site is served to users on mobile devices.
Unlike the previous plugins, WP-Optimize is a versatile web optimization solution. In addition to caching your web pages, it will help you clean up your database and compress your images, making your site even faster.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) W3TC is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. One reason for its popularity is that it is compatible with most hosting plans, including shared, VPS, and dedicated server hosting.
With W3 Total Cache, you can minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, as well as posts, pages, and RSS feeds. You can lazy-load images, defer CSS and JavaScript, eliminate render-blocking JavaScript resources, and schedule automatic database cleanups.
You can also set up integration with your CDN provider for even better website performance.
Additionally, you can test all these configurations in preview mode before deploying them on your website.
W3 Total Cache Pro offers even more functionality, including snippet caching, advanced cache statistics, lazy loading for Google Maps, and more.
6. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a free caching plugin developed by Automattic. With over two million active installations, it is the most downloaded caching plugin in the WordPress library.
Part of the appeal of this plugin is its three caching modes. “Expert” mode is the fastest, but requires you to edit your .htaccess file. While this is great for developers and technically savvy users who want more control over the caching process, it’s not ideal for all users—especially since a mistake in your htaccess file can bring down your entire site.
That’s why WP Super Cache also offers a “Simple” mode. In this mode, the plugin creates static HTML files that will be used by most visitors. There is one more mode called WP-Cache for serving custom cache files, tailored to visitors who are logged in, viewing a password-protected page, or leaving comments.
7. Hummingbird
Hummingbird offers a similar range of features as the cache plugins above: browser caching, GZIP compression, minification and deferral of CSS and JavaScript, elimination of render-blocking resources, and lazy loading of images, comments, and longer posts.
What makes Hummingbird unique is that it will scan your site, find files that are slowing it down, and provide tips and fixes. In some cases, it will even provide one-click improvements, such as a full cache package, minification of styles and scripts, and CSS and JavaScript deprecation. It makes speeding up your site as simple as possible.
There is also a premium version available with even more advanced features, including automatic scanning, uptime monitoring, improved bitrate compression, and CDN storage reduction.
- Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a simple and lightweight performance plugin for WordPress. It allows users to set cache files to expire after a period of time, flush the site cache if content has changed, pre-compress cached pages with GZIP, and minify HTML in cached pages. It also works on multi-site networks.
However, it is limited in functionality compared to other plugins on this list. For example, a user can only clear the site cache if a post type, comment, or plugin has been published/activated, updated, or deleted. Excluding content from the cache is even more complicated. Instead of checking a box, the user has to manually type in the post ID, page path, query string, or cookies to determine which pages should bypass the cache.
9. Comet Cache
Comet Cache is an easy-to-use plugin for caching your posts, pages, tags, categories, archives, RSS feeds, and XML sitemaps. The settings page contains detailed explanations of its features, making Comet Cache a beginner-friendly option for users who are new to caching. You will need to purchase Comet Cache Pro for some of the features that the plugins mentioned above offer for free, such as HTML compression and the ability to keep logged-in users in the cache.
Also, unlike other caching plugins, Comet Cache doesn’t handle GZIP compression directly. If your site is running on an Apache web server, you can enable GZIP compression in your admin dashboard with a few clicks. If not, you’ll need to create an htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory or edit the existing file. If GZIP compression is a must-have feature, this plugin may not be the right choice for you.
10. Borlabs Cache
Borlabs Cache is a highly rated premium caching plugin that starts optimizing your website the moment it is activated. In addition to the standard features that other caching plugins offer – such as CSS and JavaScript compression and merging, and lazy loading – Borlabs Cache offers unique and advanced features.
Its caching feature, for example, allows you to have some dynamic content in your static files, so you can still serve ads on cached versions of your site.
It also offers predefined cache settings so you can have different cache settings for each site in your multisite WordPress installation. Most cache plugins that support multisite networks only allow you to set global cache settings.
Speeds up your website.
A caching plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to boost website performance and increase your website visitor satisfaction. You can use any of the plugins above to create a fast website that will delight your visitors – without touching any code in your theme or htaccess files.
The article was written by Anna Fitzgerald – translated from English to Hebrew by google translate
Editing: Yahav Bengiat
