There are several easy ways to speed up your WordPress site, such as optimizing your images, purchasing a CDN service, and the main topic of this article, the WordPress caching plugin.
If you want a quick and easy way to optimize your WordPress site speed, data caching is one of the first places to look. First of all, let’s define what caching is and why it’s important. Next, we’ll explore a few plugins that can simplify and even automate the process for you.
What is cache memory?
Caching is the process of saving and storing static copies of your website’s files in a temporary storage location. This allows a web page to be delivered faster to the visitor’s browser.
To fully understand the benefits of caching, let’s see what happens when a visitor first sees your site.
When a user visits a page on your website, their browser sends a request to the server that hosts your website to request various elements of your website, including HTML files, icons, etc. styling CSS, JavaScript, images, and more Your server then builds these resources and sends them back to the user’s browser, resulting in a web page being displayed on their screen.
If your website uses caching, some 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 this information will be retrieved from the local storage on their computer instead of your web server. As you might have guessed, retrieving data from the cache is faster than retrieving data from a remote web server.
Additionally, by caching your web page, your server uses less resources to load the web page, which reduces time to first byte (TTFB). TTFB is the amount of time between a browser sending a request to the server and receiving its first byte of data. This will improve the overall performance of your website.
How to configure caching in WordPress?
While many websites use caching to improve performance, WordPress CMS does not include caching functionality as part of its core feature set.
Your hosting provider may enable caching for your site (in which case you may not be allowed to install some or all caching plugins). Alternatively, you can manually enable caching.
While you can configure caching manually on your WordPress site, it will require you to add code to the cache.php file or generate an SQL query. If you don’t have the technical background to feel comfortable with either method, an easier alternative is to use a WordPress plugin.
Take a look at some of the best caching plugins available below.
Best WordPress hosting plugin
The best caching plugins for WordPress will allow you to cache your posts and pages quickly and easily. Here is a collection of free and premium performance plugins for WordPress that do just that.
1.Rocket WP
WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that offers many powerful features. Along with providing cache preloading and GZIP compression, WP Rocket allows users to minify and combine CSS and JS files, slow load images, remove render-blocking JavaScript assets, and remove render-blocking JavaScript assets. files that don’t use CSS and schedule automatic database cleanups. This is the perfect solution to optimize your Core Web Vitals ranking and make your website faster with just a few clicks.
It is also optimized for e-commerce sites to automatically exclude the “Cart”, “Checkout” and “My Account” pages from the cache to avoid interfering with the shopping process. What sets WP Rocket apart from other speed optimization plugins is that it starts working as soon as it is installed and activated on your website.
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 many advanced features. This plugin allows site administrators to delete all cached files and minified CSS and JS files, or schedule them to be deleted at a specific time. You can also enable or disable caching options for mobile devices and signed-in users. Check the box on the All Settings page. Unlike other free caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache doesn’t just minify your HTML and CSS files, it combines them to make your code cleaner and your web pages lighter.
The premium version offers even more features such as minification of JavaScript files, elimination of render-blocking JavaScript resources, lazy loading, and more.
3. LiteSpeed Caching
LiteSpeed Cache is another five-star caching plugin in the WordPress directory. It can minify and combine your CSS and JavaScript files, load images slowly, optimize images automatically, and more.
What differentiates LiteSpeed Cache from other plugins is that it is a server-level cache, which is faster than PHP-level cache. So even though the plugin is free, it requires you to use the LiteSpeed web server for the built-in page caching features. Page cache can bypass PHP and database queries and use cookies to serve multiple versions of cached content depending on device, geographic location, and application. the user’s currency. You will need to pay a small monthly fee to purchase a license to use this server.
4.WP Optimization
WP-Optimize is another five-star WordPress directory hosting plugin with over a million active installs. You can configure plugin settings to instruct client browsers to reuse cached resources, compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and minify and defer CSS and JavaScript to reduce size and the number of requests sent to your server.
You can also check the box to create separate files for mobile devices to ensure that an optimized version of your website is made available to users on mobile devices.
Unlike previous plugins, WP-Optimize is an all-in-one solution for web optimization. In addition to caching your web pages, it will help you clean your database and compress images, which will make your site even faster.
5.W3 is full of buffer
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) W3TC is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. One of the reasons it’s so popular is that it’s compatible with most hosting plans, including shared hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers.
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, remove render-blocking JavaScript resources, and schedule automatic database cleanups. You can also set up an integration with your CDN provider for even better website performance. And, you can test all of these configurations in preview before deploying them on your site.
W3 Total Cache Pro offers even more features, including fractional caching, advanced caching statistics, partial 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 installs, it is the most downloaded caching plugin in the WordPress directory.
Part of the appeal of this plugin is its three hosting modes. The “Expert” mode is the fastest but requires modifying the .htaccess file. While it’s ideal for experienced developers and users who want more control over the caching process, it’s not ideal for all users, especially because of an error in the file. .htaccess can delete entire website.
That’s why WP Super Cache also offers a “Simple” mode. In this mode, the plugin generates static HTML files to serve most visitors. There is another mode called WP-Cache to serve custom cached files to visitors who are logged in, viewing a password protected page, or leaving a comment.
- Hummingbirds
Hummingbird offers a similar range of functionality to the caching plugins above:
browser caching, GZIP compression, minify and defer CSS and JavaScript, remove render-blocking resources and slow loading for longer images, comments and posts
What’s unique about Hummingbird is that it will scan your site, find files that are slowing it down, and offer advice and fixes. In some cases, it will even offer one-click enhancements, such as full caching, minimal styling and scripting, and CSS and JavaScript rollovers. This makes speeding up your site as easy as possible.
There is a premium version available with even more advanced features including automatic scanning, uptime monitoring, improved shrink compression, and CDN-hosted minification.
7.Rocket WP
WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin that offers many powerful features. Along with providing cache preloading and GZIP compression, WP Rocket allows users to minify and combine CSS and JS files, slow load images, remove render-blocking JavaScript content, and schedule cleanup automatically from the database.
It is also optimized for e-commerce sites to automatically exclude the “Cart”, “Checkout” and “My Account” pages from the cache to avoid interfering with the shopping process.
What sets WP Rocket apart from other speed optimization plugins is that it starts working as soon as it is installed and activated on your website.
8. Cache Enabler
Cache Enabler is a simple and lightweight performance plugin for WordPress. It allows users to set cached files to expire after a certain time, clear the cache of pages if the content has changed, pre-compress cached pages with GZIP, and collect Small HTML in pages by hiding. It also works on multisite networks.
However, its functionality is limited compared to other plugins on this list. For example, a user can only clear the page cache if the post type, comment or plugin has been published/activated, updated or deleted. Excluding content from the cache is even more complicated. Instead of checking the box, the user must manually enter the post ID, page path, query string, or cookie to control which pages should bypass the cache.
9.Comet Memory
Comet Cache is an easy-to-use plugin to cache your WordPress XML posts, pages, tags, categories, archives, RSS feeds, and 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 to get some of the free features offered by the plugins mentioned above, such as HTML compression and the ability to cache logged in users.
Also, unlike other caching plugins, Comet Cache does not handle GZIP compression directly. If your site is running on the Apache web server, you can enable GZIP compression in your admin panel with just a few clicks. Otherwise, you will need to create a .htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory or modify the file already there. If GZIP compression is a must-have, this plugin may not be the right choice for you.
10. Borlabs . Buffer
Borlabs Cache is a highly rated premium caching plugin that starts optimizing your website upon activation. In addition to the standard features offered by other caching plugins – like compressing and combining CSS and JavaScript files as well as partial loading .
For example, its fragment caching feature allows you to have dynamic content in your static files so you can still serve ads in cached versions of your site.
It also provides cache presets so you can have different cache settings for each page in your WordPress multisite installation. Most caching plugins that support multisite networks only allow you to set global cache settings.
Conclusion
The cache plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to boost website performance and increase user satisfaction. You can use any of the plugins above to create a quick website that will delight your visitors – without touching any code in your theme or .htaccess file.
