8 Best WordPress Cache Plugins to Speed Up Your Website

The cache is an integral part of website performance. Having a fast-loading website with minimal content breaks will make your visitors happier and more likely to revisit your site. Many different cache plugins are available for WordPress, so it can be difficult to know which one is best for you.

What is Website Loading Time?

Loading time is the amount of time taking by a webpage to completely load up in your browser. It is mainly affected by three things: your hosting provider, page size, and types of files being delivered.

Factors Affecting Websites Speed

• Your hosting provider might not deliver proper speed and performance to handle your website.
• Plugins or any code added inside your website can affect the speed. 
• If your page has a lot of scripts, images or other files that might take time to load up completely.
• Poorly optimized images. Images can contribute to around 80% to 90% towards page loading time. If you are using an image that is too large or has a low quality, it will take more time for them to load up.

Tips to load website faster

Fast loading speed is important to show visitors that you are concerned about their time. If they feel that your website takes too long to load up, they might just leave it.

Here are some tips and tricks to improve your website speed:

• Choose a quality hosting and configure it properly to get optimal speed.
• If your hosting provider offers caching services, use them.
• Deactivate all the plugins that are not being used by your website.
• Add a CDN in your hosting plan to decrease the load on your server, or you can use an external CDN such as Cloudflare.
• Keep your website size small by removing or deactivating all the files that are not necessary.
• You can use a good cache plugin to improve poor speed and performance.
• Cache plugins may not be compatible with all themes and plugins, so check carefully before proceeding with an installation.
• Minify CSS, JS, and HTML files and optimize images to load faster.
• Remember to test the Website on Page speed tool before going live!

What are Cache Plugins?

The cache is a collection of temporarily stored data for quick access upon request. Cache plugins are very important because they help to make websites load faster. A cache plugin works by creating copies of static HTML files and storing them on the server, which means that instead of processing every page request, it simply serves up a cached version. As you can see, this is extremely useful for speeding up your website because there is no need to load all of your plugins with every page request.

There are two types of caching: page caching and object/database caching. They both work under different conditions to achieve maximum performance.

Page caching works by saving a static version of a web page and delivering that to the viewer. This reduces load time considerably.

Object or database caching stores data in memory faster than saving it to disk.

Importance of Utilizing a Cache Plugin

Many times, web hosts will cache your WordPress site for you. This is not the case with all hosting companies, though; some of them won’t do it by default. If your host does not have this enabled on their end, there are many WordPress caching plugins available that you can install to improve caching on your own.

Cache plugins are not only useful for speeding up your website; they also act as an additional layer of security to prevent hackers from accessing sensitive data. They can easily be used alongside other types of plugins (such as malware scanners) to keep your site running smoothly without sacrificing anything!

8 Popular Cache Plugins for WordPress

There are a few more things you need to understand: Different types of cache plugins use different methods to cache your website. So choose wisely, because you don’t need all of them. Let’s look at the 8 top-rated WordPress cache plugins comparison here. We will discuss each one to help you find the perfect solution for your needs.

1) WP Rocket

If speed is your number one priority, then look no further than WP Rocket. It loads pages extremely quickly with its lazy loading features. And also makes all of the options easy enough for even the least tech-savvy person to understand! The plugin comes only in the premium version.

Features

• Automatically enable GZIP compression, Browser caching, and Page caching with single click
• Provides CDN support, Object caching support
• Allows DNS pre-fetching and Cache preloading
• Minification of HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• Lazy loading images to improve User experience
• Database Optimization and File Optimization
• Multisite Compatibility
• Optimization of Google fonts.

2) W3 Total Cache

One of the most popular plugins available on the WordPress repository with 1 million+ active installs. Free and premium, both versions are available of this plugin.

Features

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private, and dedicated servers
• Content delivery network (CDN) management with Media Library, theme files, and WordPress itself
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages, posts, CSS, and JS in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN
• Caching of database objects
• Minify CSS, Minify JavaScript, and Minify HTML 
• Defer offscreen images using Lazy Load to improve the user experience
• Browser caching using cache-control
• WP-CLI support for cache purging and query string updating

3) WP Super Cache

This is another popular plugin that is activated on 2 Million+ websites. This plugin is a product of Automatic, a parent company for WordPress. It’s easy enough that even beginners should be able to use it without any trouble at all!

The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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. 

Features

• Support for multiple caching types (Mod_Rewrite, PHP, and Legacy)
• Cache rebuild is the unique feature of this plugin – When a visitor leaves a comment, the cached file for that page is deleted, and the next visitor recreates the cached page.
• CDN support and Cache preload.
• Serve static html files.

4) Cache Enabler

This plugin doesn’t have quite as many features as some of the others on our list, but it is still among the good cache plugins for WordPress, with 100k+ active installs. With only a few basic settings to play with, this plugin’s simplicity makes it very easy to use.

Features

• Automatic and manual cache clearing
• WP-CLI cache clearing
• WebP support (convert images to WebP with Optimus)
• Brotli and Gzip pre-compression support
• Minification of HTML excluding or including inline CSS and JavaScript
• Real-time cache size display in the WordPress dashboard
• 304 Not Modified support

5) WP Fastest Cache

This plugin has 1 Million+ active installs on the WordPress Repository. As its name implies, it is designed to speed up websites by generating static HTML files for pages instead of processing them through WordPress. You don’t need to modify the .htaccess file, and It will be modified automatically.

Features

• Mod_Rewrite, which is the fastest method, is used 
• Admin can delete all cached files, minified CSS, and JS files
• Cache Timeout – All cached files are deleted at the determined time
• Cache Timeout – All cached files are deleted at the determined time
• Cache Timeout for specific pages
• Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices and for logged-in users
• SSL support, CDN support and Cloudflare support
• Preload Cache – Create the site cache automatically
• Allows WP-CLI cache clearing

6) LiteSpeed Cache

This is the top-rated Cache plugin for WordPress with 2 Million+ active installs. This is featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features. You can use its API to customize smart purging, customize cache rules, create cache varies, and make WP nonce cacheable, among other things.

Features

• Free QUIC.cloud CDN Cache
• Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis) Support+
• Image Optimization (Lossless/Lossy) and Lazy-load images/iframes
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
• Multiple CDN Support, OPcode Cache Support
• Browser Cache Support
• Database Cleaner and Optimizer
• DNS Prefetch and supports Cloudflare API
• Single Site and Multisite (Network) support
• WebP image format support

7) Autoptimize

It is one of the best free WordPress cache plugins available on the WordPress repository, with 2 million+ active installs. It is focused on providing an optimal page load time, and it does that by loading CSS asynchronously, optimizing images, and providing a mobile-friendly experience. It also moves style to the page head and script to the footer. It’s minified HTML code and saves extra bits of bandwidth. It doesn’t clear the cache automatically.

Features

• Minify and cache CSS, JS, and HTML
• Moves and defers JS to the footer and CSS to the page head
• Optimize and lazy-load images (with support for WebP and AVIF formats)
• Optimize Google Fonts
• Adds expires headers

8) WP-Optimize

This plugin is activated on the 1 MIllion+ website. It will boost your site’s speed and performance through caching. Clean the database, compress images, and cache your site for higher speed & SEO.

Features

• Clean and Optimize your database.
• Compress your images.
• Cache your pages for super fast load times 
• Enables you to minify and asynchronise CSS and JavaScript
• Premium version provides Multisite Support, WP-CLI support, and Lazy Loading
• Deleting unused and unwanted images is also available in the paid version

Checkout: Ultimate guide on WordPress Optimization

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different WordPress cache plugins available for you to use. Using one (or more) of these plugins will allow your website to run much faster than before, and it is something that every website owner should consider adding to their site if they are looking for a way to make their pages load more quickly. WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, and W3 Total Cache are some of the best options available.

Now that you have read this article, you can feel even more confident about using WordPress caching plugins on your site, and hopefully, it will help you choose a plugin that will work well with your website’s design and setup. If you keep these considerations in mind, you should be well on your way to improving the speed of your website.