When surfing the internet, no one wants a slow website. In this post we have written best WordPress Cache Plugins. Most people will leave your site immediately if it takes too long to load. What’s more, search engines will rank your website based on its loading speeds. To achieve the goals set for your website, be it high subscriptions or eCommerce sales, you will need your site to load fast.
What causes a slow website?
Upon creating a WordPress website, you may immediately realize that it isn’t as fast as you’d like it to be. Furthermore, as you add plugins and content to your site, it will become slower with time. This phenomenon is a result of the background processes that occur as the content a visitor requested is processed. The more the content you have on your site, the longer everything takes.
How do you improve the loading speeds of your WordPress website?
Rather than reducing the number of plugins or limiting your content, the best way to reduce the loading times of your site is by installing one of the best WordPress cache plugins. Cache plugins create a static version of your content, therefore, shortening the loading process, and reducing the loading time.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is an excellent cache plugin that is easy to configure and is useful in boosting the loading speeds of WordPress websites. With 870,000+ sites using this plugin, its price tag is more than justified.
The moment you install WP Rocket and go through the few configuration processes, the plugin launches itself automatically with instantaneous results. Once it activates, this plugin gets to work, immediately refining your search engine optimization and boosting your conversion rates. The crawler feature of WP Rocket helps a lot toward this goal. It encourages preloads of cache upon a visit to your site. WP Rocket compresses your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files so that the loading process is shorter and quicker.
With WP Rocket, images don’t load the moment a visitor loads your website since this slows everything down. Instead, images load as the user scrolls down your pages. Developers will love this plugin since it has a clean layout and has many hooks to facilitate manipulations by developers. Coding novices don’t need to worry since WP Rocket is installable with a few clicks that don’t require coding knowledge. The support team is incredibly helpful and available to fix any issues quickly.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is perfect for super-fast loading speeds of any website. This plugin creates static files from your dynamic HTML files even before anyone loads your pages. To have preloaded static files for all your posts, you can enable ‘preload mode’ and have all visitors access cached pages upon loading a page. A single file will be served to countless visitors unless they have left remarks on a post. In this case, WP Super Cache constructs cached files to accommodate their comments.
To boost the speed of your site, you can customize the garbage collection settings. These will enable you to delete old cached files that you no longer need. If you don’t want the deletion of any static data, you can set the cache timeout to zero. For the service of JavaScript and CSS static files, the integrated Content Delivery Network off-linker will do all the work for you. When a visitor requests a page/file, the CDN downloads it and serves it.
For custom caching, WP Super Cache has three hooks available that work differently to ensure that your loading speeds are otherworldly. This plugin also features a unique plugin system for loading caches fast. WP Super Cache supports up to 19 languages and is updated regularly.
Breeze
Breeze is a world-beater of a WordPress cache plugin. Despite being free and simple, it is also very powerful and has a user-friendly layout. It provides different additional options for WordPress performance optimization. Whether you need a cache plugin for a standard WordPress site, a WooCommerce WordPress site, or a WordPress multisite, Breeze is perfectly suited to fulfill the purpose.
Breeze drastically boosts the speed of your website and offers a goldmine of optimization resources. Other features that you get include a file-level cache system and database cleanup. This WordPress cache plugin also supports minification, simplified CDN integration, and Varnish cache. Its convenience makes it an asset for any WordPress website owner. Installing and configuring Breeze is extremely easy since you can do it right off the WordPress dashboard. All the default options that come with Breeze work seamlessly right out of the box.
The simplicity that is associated with this plugin alone qualifies it to be among the best free WordPress cache plugins. All you have to do is install and activate the plugin from your dashboard and start reaping the results. If Varnish isn’t installed on your servers, Breeze utilizes its internal cache mechanism to enhance your site’s performance.
“We use the Breeze cache plugin on more than half of our websites. It’s a powerful plugin that gets the job done, while being easy to install, setup and customize,” says Donald Chan, founder of remote working blog WFH Wins.
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is undoubtedly one of the best free WordPress cache plugins, with a revolutionary design and amazing function levels. This plugin allows you to compress your images, clean and optimize your database, and cache your site for speed. The caching feature is based on the fastest caching engine in the world. It also allows you to minify and asynchronies JavaScript and CSS. Combining the caching capabilities of a caching plugin such as WP-Optimize with database optimization brings a significant effect on a site’s performance.
WP-Optimize removes all unnecessary data – such as spam comments -, trackbacks, pingbacks, and expired transient options. This WordPress cache plugin carries out these cleanups every week unless you command it to use a different interval. What’s more, you don’t have to run manual queries for WP-Optimize to perform optimizations. You can trigger a backup of your site prior to optimization easily with UpdraftPlus.
The premium version of WP-Optimize comes with extra features that mean additional freedom and flexibility. This version of the plugin supports multisite management, which will come in handy in case you have more than a single website to manage. By using this plugin, you have a system that deletes unwanted and unused images. It also adds the lazy loading feature to your website for faster loading speeds.
Cache Enabler
WordPress websites need various enhancement techniques, and Cache Enabler is one of the best free WordPress cache plugins for boosting your site’s speed. The plugin does this by creating static versions of your site. The Cache Enabler is an incredibly efficient disk cache engine that supports the manual or automatic (or both) clearing of your site’s cache. You can clear the cache of specific pages manually.
Cache Enabler utilizes WP-CLI, the WordPress command-line interface, which saves you from needing a web browser as you configure onsite operations, such as updating plugins. This plugin enables you to showcase the precise cache size on your dashboard. Minifying HTML and inline JavaScript becomes much easier with this WordPress cache plugin. One of its most basic benefits is its support for WordPress multisite management.
Whichever custom post types you have used on your site will work with Cache Enabler seamlessly. You can have ‘304 Not Modified’ tags with this plugin if the page hasn’t been modified since it was last cached. The plugin will go through your upload directory for any PNG or JPG images with an equivalent WebP file. If it finds such images, it will cache the URI of these images in a WEbPstatic file.
Cloudflare
If you’re after one of the best free WordPress cache plugins, Cloudflare could be precisely what you need. This plugin will significantly improve the response time of your website and your pages. It is difficult to cache everything in dynamic websites like WordPress without encountering some problems. It would be impossible not to include your web pages from the cached bunch, Ajax requests, sessions of logged-in users, and other elements. Cloudflare makes all these and more possible.
Cloudflare is able to drastically enhance the response time of your site because it saves a lot of bandwidth and creates caches for HTML pages. On the other hand, you can purchase the premium version of the WordPress cache plugin. Both the free and premium versions of Cloudflare are compatible with all WordPress themes and WordPress versions. It is also compatible with all the popular WordPress-affiliated plugins.
Redis Object Cache
Redis Object Cache is a reliable WordPress cache plugin with a bunch of special features that make it a standout among the best free WordPress cache plugins. It boasts classy performance due to repeated testing and regular updates. It is 100% compliant with the WordPress API. This WordPress cache plugin has easy debugging and logging to have the easiest time using your website.
With this plugin, you get cache analytics and preloading features for easier site management. Redis Object Cache boasts secure connections with TLS and regular health checks via WordPress and WP-CLI. Everyone wants their site to rank as high as possible; Redis Object Cache is optimized for Yoast SEO, so your site can have additional SEO enhancement.
If you want to have a WooCommerce page or need a WooCommerce site, this WordPress cache plugin allows you to do this with incredible ease since it is optimized for the purpose. The compatibility of the plugin with Jetpack means you can use the awesome toolkit that offers myriads of features, such as ad control.
Autoptimize
Autoptimize is an excellent cache plugin that optimizes your site comfortably with great features. It facilitates the compression of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files in several ways. It joins all of the scripts and styles of your content, minifies and compresses them. All the styles relocate to the page head, and you can choose to move the scripts to the footer. This way, your pages become very light and load incredibly fast.
With this plugin, you can easily optimize images and set them to lazy-load for a faster website. It also allows you to optimize Google Fonts so they won’t be a burden to your site. What’s more, it synchronizes non-aggregated JavaScript and eliminates WordPress core emoji cruft. So that you can manipulate Autoptimize to fit websites of different niches, the developers have equipped it with extensive API.
On the WordPress directory, Autoptimize has an average rating of 4.7 stars from 890+ reviews. It boasts over 1 million active installations and has frequent free updates. It’s perfect for a multilingual site since it supports up to 25 languages. Autoptimize premium support is exceptional, along with its services for web performance optimisation.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a well-equipped plugin for your SEO improvement and visitor experience optimization with features such as Content Delivery Network (CDN), among others. This plugin has maintained its popularity for over a decade and has over a million active installations.
Among the features that make this plugin stand out is the compatibility with shared hosting, dedicated server clusters, and virtual private dedicated servers. The CDN is straightforward to use with WordPress, theme files, and media library. W3 Total Cache supports Accelerated Mobile Pages for maximum performance. For minified and compressed posts, pages, feeds, JavaScript, and CSS, this plugin is an excellent option. It caches these items in memory, or on CDN. The plugin also saves tags, categories, comments, and other feed elements of the site in the same locations. Other items that are cached include search result pages, database items, fragments, and objects.
This free WordPress cache plugin facilitates direct importation of post attachments into media libraries and CDN. W3 Total Cache spoils you for choice with a variety of security-enhancing features. You can monitor the performance of your site since this plugin will cache its statistics. The W3 Total Cache framework accommodates extensions and customization. Its developers have also integrated it with reverse proxy through Nginx or Varnish.
WP Fastest Cache
Right from the name of the plugin, WP Fastest Cache promises incredible loading speeds for your website through the incorporation of several features.
This caching plugin uses the fastest caching method, Mod_Rewrite. Management, including the deletion of cached and minified files, is possible from the options page. You can set the cache timeout for specific pages. After this time is over, the plugin will delete all the cached files of selected pages. This plugin features a shortcode, which you can use to block caches of specific pages. An option is also available for activation and disabling of caches for mobile device users, and another for logged in users. For maximum customizability and functionality, WP Fastest Cache supports Cloudflare, CDN, and SSL.
You can enable preloading of cache for all the elements of your site so that your visitors have an easy time once they attempt to load any of them. Other performance-enhancing characteristics of this plugin include minifying HTML and CSS. WP Fastest Cache leverages browser caching, so that repeat visitors have faster loading speeds. What’s more, this plugin combines CSS and JavaScript. You can select to disable CSS and WordPress emoji. The plugin supports multiple WordPress sites.
LiteSpeed Cache
With a rating of 4.9 stars on the WordPress directory, the popularity of LiteSpeed Cache is apparent. This cache plugin combines an assortment of excellent features with a server-level cache. It is multi-site support and is compatible with a variety of popular WordPress such as Yoast SEO and WooCommerce.
To save you space for caches, LiteSpeed Cache comes with free QUIC.cloud for CDN Cache. It also supports multiple CDN. It automatically generates critical CSS without the necessity for commands. With this plugin, your CSS and JavaScript will load asynchronously. All images and iframes are set to lazy load to reduce the loading time of pages and posts. The image placeholders that come with the plugin are fully responsive too. LiteSpeed Cache supports WebP image format. For logged-in users, the plugin will generate a private cache.
A clean database is a significant reason for the fast loading of your pages. LiteSpeed Cache takes care of this with a database cleaner and optimizer feature. With PageSpeed score optimization, Google will rank your website high in SEO. This plugin has cache import and export settings. Its user interface is gorgeous and straightforward to use, and it supports single and multiple site networks. On top of these fantastic features, you also get widgets and shortcodes in the form of ESI blocks.
Final Thoughts
Slow loading speeds are bad for your website and can be a significant obstacle as you strive to achieve set goals. This problem may not be your fault since you have to add plugins and content to your website to realize these goals. However, even a few extra seconds are enough for a visitor on your site to grow impatient and leave.
To keep visitors on your content and make them want to come back, you need to improve your site’s loading rates. Managing loading speeds child’s play with any one of the best WordPress cache plugins. Choose the one you like and get going.