Are you using any WordPress cache plugin? The year 2021 has brought loads of changes in how we look at technology and use it. We spend more and more time surfing websites, and this means more visitors. We all got more time in our hands; still, we wouldn’t want to stick on some website for a long time.
Did you know that in a study by CDN service Akamai, it is found out that 47% of the website users would want their webpage to load in two seconds or less? Even 47% of users were found to leave the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Shrinking the file is obviously not an option because of video, font, images and scripts that must be added along with the main content if you want to run a successful website.
Luckily, there is an option that can help you load your site faster without shrinking the file size, and this is the installation of a caching plugin.
- What is caching?
- What is the need for WordPress caching?
- How does caching help optimise your SEO ranking? – Top 5 best options
- Conclusion
- FAQ
What is caching?
Whenever someone visits your page, it requires a request to your server. The server then sends the results to the visitor’s web browser. The end result is the display of your website at the user’s end. However, depending upon your website’s file size and complexity, this whole process can take a bit of time. This is where caching comes to your rescue. Caching stores the viewed content by the user and generates static HTML pages. This will help your website to load faster, and that means more user engagement.
What is the need for WordPress caching?
- If you want to make your WordPress powered site work faster, installing a WordPress caching plugin should be your top priority.
- It helps enhance your website’s performance and speed because static cached files load faster than dynamic ones.
- It can help to reduce the load on your hosting server by saving the server memory and I/O operations.
- Search engines always favour websites that load faster; therefore, a caching plugin can help you rank your website.
- Cached websites provide an excellent overall user experience because a faster site means a quicker browsing speed.
There are many caching plugins available that would help your website caching tasks easier. However, with so many options, it is easy to get confused. I have tried and tested some best WordPress caches and list them accordingly for you to choose easily.
How does caching help optimise your SEO ranking? – Top 5 best options
Caching basically helps optimise the loading time of your site and thus improves your site for search engines. Site loading time directly affects the user experience and, therefore, your site’s ability to convert visitors into buyers.
Did you know Google itself has revealed that even a second’s difference in site loading time can result in a 20% reduction in web traffic? Therefore, search engines are considering any site’s loading time to determine the site rank in the search result.
Therefore, installing a cache plugin is required to optimise the loading time and improve your search engine ranking.
WP Rocket
This WordPress caching plugin is the most popular among others, and rightly so. This plugin is currently installed in 100,000 sites because of how simple it is to install and use. This caching plugin is the top choice of both beginners and pro in the field.
The WP Rocket plugin is available for $49 per year for a single website. However, there is also a developer plan that costs $249 annually for unlimited websites.
Among many other free plugins available, this priced caching plugin is still used by most websites because of the smooth interface and easy set-up. Many additional features are not available in free caching plugins like it helps improve your website ranking and shrink the CSS files to boost up your page loading speed. It also comes with lots of hooks, which will help you easily extending its features.
Contrary to other plugins, this plugin also optimises your Google font, which is a plus point for me.
One of the most useful features of the WP caching plugin is that it has an ‘images on request’ option. This means the images will get loaded only when they are visible on the screen.
W3 Total Cache
If you are interested in improving the conversion rate by generating leads, this cache plugin can be your pick. With the W3 Total cache plugin’s help, you can drastically increase your website’s performance due to its most famous feature, i.e., content delivery network (CDN) integration. This cache plugin can also support secure socket layer (SSL), accelerated mobile pages (AMP) and fragmented disk.
If you want to adjust a bit of page functioning, the good news for you is that this cache plugin has a dedicated settings page, for example, browser caching, page caching and database caching. Many of the other WordPress cache plugins do not offer this in-depth kind of customisation.
Contrary to the WP rocket, which is the highest demanding cache plugin, W3 total cache is free to use, which means it is an open-source plugin.
Although free to use, this cache plugin can be a little too complicated for beginners because you may be required to go through the 16 pages in the settings section, but once you get the hang of it, W3 works like a charm.
Some of its exciting features include HTTP compression and feed optimisation.
WP Super Cache
This WordPress cache plugin has more than two million installations. Such a large number of active users and installation easily give an idea about the WP super cache plugin’s quality and performance.
Relatively easy to get started in comparison to W3 cache, this WordPress cache plugin comprises seven tabs in the ‘options’ tab. If you enable the cache from the ‘easy’ tab, the plugin will begin caching your pages automatically.
Instead of displaying heavier PHP scripts, WP super cache shows the static HTML files. There are three caching modes that this WordPress cache plugin offers:
– Simple
– WP-cache caching
– Expert
As their name suggests, simple caching is easy; an expert is a bit more complex WP-cache caching is used for caching content for known website visitors.
This free and open-source plugin is compatible with the newest version of WordPress. Though free and easy to use, this cache plugin offers fewer features than WP cache and W3 cache. However, numerous users find this WordPress cache plugin the most effective and easy to use.
Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is developed by one of my favourite companies. They are very well known for their CDN, which I have written a through article about where I focus on how much value you get for money using their CDN.
It’s open source and completely free to use, it is updated fairly often which means it’s still supported. This cache plugin has earned 90,000 active installations in the short span of time and an impressive rating of 4.5 out of 5.
They claim through their WordPress plugin description they are the first plugin to serve WebP images without using Javascript. Moreover they fully support the attribute srcset, which makes it possible to serve multiple versions of an image in one html tag.
Google has claimed in an article that the new WebP format makes it possible to compress the images by up to 26% without loosing any quality in the image.
They mention the way the plugin work is that they make 2 files. A plain HTML file and a gzip compressed file. By using these 2 files the plugin delivers the content to the user in the fastest possible way.
The installation and setup of the plugin is done fairly easy and fast. The plugin does a lot of the work for you. If you experience issues then try to disable settings until the issue disappears.
However if you want to combine this cache plugin with a CDN, you need a separate plugin to achieve this.
It has a variety of options in terms of automating a lot of your processes. You can make the plugin empty the site cache automatically when you update or create new pages. This is super helpful as it saves you time in the end.
If we need to wrap it all up, it’s a super simple and efficient cache plugin that does what you expect from a cache plugin.
Comet Cache
This WordPress caching plugin is the easiest and most informative cache plugin to use for WordPress. With an easy and user-friendly dashboard, you will find navigation and getting started very easy. If you are new to the term caching and how it works, comet cache offers tons of resources to help you understand it. This will help you in settings configuration and, ultimately, your WordPress site performance.
You’ll be offered different options with this WordPress cache plugin:
– Tags
– Posts
– Pages
– Categories
You should specially consider this WordPress cache plugin if you specifically want simple customisation. Comet cache has paid and free versions both. The free source offers many features similar to other open sources; however, the paid upgrade has more advanced features than the free one, like automatic and intelligent cache clearing, which allows you to configure your settings even from the beginning.
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Conclusion
In today’s time, the website that has a slow loading time has no chance of running further—installing a WordPress cache plugin is inevitable as it significantly boosts your site’s loading time and hence provides the best user experience. Now the question arises as to which plugin you should use to optimise your site performance. Choosing the right plugin depends entirely on your requirements because some are made for beginners, which other for more tech-savvy pro individuals. Some WordPress cache plugins work best with WordPress, while others can do with a website of any sort. You can use this article as a guideline to help you find the best plugin according to your needs.
If you want more information on how to optimise your website, I’ve written about 5 plugins that could help you do that.
FAQ
What is the best WordPress cache plugin?
Many plugins in the market are designed to optimise your site’s performance and user experience. However, choosing the best cache plugin depends on your requirements as different plugins cater to your website’s diverse needs. The WordPress cache plugin that is recommended by most users are:
– WP Rocket
– W3 Total cache
– WP Super cache
– Hyper cache
– Comet cache
Where is a WordPress cache stored?
It is stored in the wp-content/cache folder in your WordPress installation.
Do I need a WordPress cache plugin?
If you wish to optimise your site’s loading time, then installing a WordPress cache plugin is inevitable. Without the WordPress cache plugin, the user will have to download the web content of your pages every time, and this will significantly increase the loading time, and hence you will lose many of your visitors.
How does WordPress cache plugin work?
The process of WordPress caching involves saving dynamically generated files in the server’s hard disk and displaying them to the cache every time a user makes a request.
