What is the best WordPress cache plugin for your website? — And why is it a must in 2020?

Are you using any WordPress cache plugin? The year 2020 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?

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 optimize your SEO ranking?

Caching basically helps optimize 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 optimize 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 optimizes 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 customization.

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 optimization.

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.

Hyper cache

Though a new cache plugin in the market, hyper cache has earned the right hype among the WordPress site users. This cache plugin has earned 30,000 active installations in the short span of time and an impressive rating of 4.5 out of 5.

Hyper cache works relatively well with low resources hosting servers. This WordPress cache plugin effectively enhances the loading of your WordPress powered site or blog by optimizing your bandwidth.

The installation and set-up process is fast, and you won’t have any problem getting started with it, so it’s easy to say that the hyper cache is the best caching plugin for beginners.

Just like other options on the list, the hyper cache is free to use too. It offers CDN support as well as mobile-friendly caching. So, if you run a blog with lots of comments, then this WordPress cache plugin can be of great help.

You may encounter some odd-named settings, but hyper cache provides detailed information about the settings so that you easily understand and start working with it.

One of the interesting features that this plugin has is that your backup files will be smaller because cache folders won’t be included in your backup, which will help you save a lot of space.

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 customization. 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.

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 optimize 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.