Every site owner is almost desperate to improve loading speeds—even if it’s good to start with. Slow sites can take search engine penalties, so it’s important to find all of the ways you can serve your pages quickly. A WordPress caching plugin is practically essential for a modern website, so choosing the right one becomes a big decision early on.
I’m going to help you select the right plugin for your needs, but also discuss some related concepts. By the end of the post, you’ll be the king or queen of caching! Let’s begin with a brief overview of caching in general.
A Quick Primer on Caching
There’s a lot of data that shuttles back and forth when visiting a website. All of these requests need to travel from the browser, speak with the site’s server, and come back with the request status and associated data. The time this takes accumulates and equates in part to your site’s loading speed.
In simple terms, caching assumes you’ll visit the site again and stores some of this data. This is ‘client-side’ or browser caching. Next time, the browser will pull the data from the cache, which will improve your loading speed.
In contrast, ‘server-side’ caching stores this data on the site’s server rather than the user’s computer. This is the remit of most WordPress caching plugins. There are a number of sub-types of server-side caching. For WordPress websites, there are three that matter:
- Page caching: Your site is dynamic because it uses the PHP and JavaScript programming languages and to create run elements such as forms, button animations, and more. Page caching takes all of that and makes your site ‘static’. In short, this cuts down on data transfers and bandwidth and can improve loading speeds too.
- Opcode caching: Your site’s code often needs compilation before it can run. An explanation on this is beyond the scope of the post, but a cache can store these code compiles and recall them next time you visit.
- Object caching: This relates to all of the associated database queries that a web request will generate. These also hit your loading speed and bandwidth and the right plugin can cache them too.
This isn’t all of the caching types available, but as long as you understand server-side caching, you’ll be able to begin choosing a plugin.
What a WordPress Caching Plugin Offers Your Site
WordPress plugins are great when they simplify complicated and deep technology. Caching is one of those cases. For you, a plugin is as straightforward as clicking a toggle switch to On:
Because of this obfuscation, many caching plugins will offer much more than straightforward page caching. This is where related technology comes into play. I’ll talk more about some of this throughout the post, but these plugins will often provide GZIP compression, file minification, third-party global storage, and much more.
It’s this blend of simplicity and scope that makes a WordPress caching plugin a vital part of your site. However, there are some cases where you don’t need one at all.
When You Wouldn’t Need to Use a WordPress Caching Plugin
I’m going to stick my neck out and say that practically every site can benefit from a caching plugin: they’re that vital. There are some cases where you should stay away from caching plugins altogether though.
This could be certain types of site, such as membership websites. Even so, if the plugin you choose can exclude individual pages from the cache, you don’t have to forgo using one here either.
If you use a managed WordPress host, such as Kinsta, you likely won’t need a caching plugin either—those types are on its ‘banned’ list of plugins. This is because many of these hosts now handle all types of caching within its architecture. For example, Kinsta provides Edge Caching, server caching, content delivery, and even database object caching for Redis without the need for further plugins.
Other hosts will provide in-house plugins to handle caching, such as SiteGround. Again, this means you won’t need to hunt down your own solution. Finally, some custom WordPress dashboard solutions don’t have a need for caching plugins either.
I now use SpinupWP and DigitalOcean as my business site’s bedrock. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this post (but could be something I explain in the future!). Regardless, that combination doesn’t need third-party caching plugins because the developers of SpinupWP implement robust page and object caching.
In short, it could be that you don’t need to worry about finding a plugin at all. Instead, you can look into other ways of serving your content that still benefits your performance.
The Difference Between Caching and a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is another one of these crucial pieces of functionality that all sites could benefit from in my opinion. This acts in a similar way to caching, and as such, it’s a related technology that you should incorporate into your site.
In a nutshell, a CDN stores copies of your content across a global network of servers. This is often media assets rather than database or other forms of site content—one difference between a CDN and caching.
The other difference is how those servers distribute your assets. It’s dynamic in a way. A user heads to your site in a specific country that’s far from your ‘home’ server. A local CDN server will call on its cache of assets and populate your site to preserve the UX.
As such, caching and CDN are similar, but not the same—and both are something I would want to leverage for the best site speed and performance.
Configuring a WordPress Caching Plugin: When Something Goes Wrong
Site errors and glitches are never welcome, although you might find installing a caching plugin brings them about more than you’d like.
The interplay between your site and a caching plugin can often have a lot of cross-over. The main issue you’ll find is that pages don’t update and refresh as you’d expect. For example, this is common when making design changes that don’t apply.
Firstly, it’s important to turn off your caching plugin and run a staging site to cut out any ‘laggy’ updates. Even so, clearing the cache from within WordPress could solve some of these problems for a live site too:
However, remember that there are different caches running at the same time. This means you’ll need to potentially clear several caches before you rectify any issues. For instance, start with your browser cache. From there, clear your site’s cache from the plugin interface. Finally, check out your server dashboard to see if there are any caching options you need to work with.
‘Plan Z’ is to turn everything off to see if that fixes the problem. Once you resolve the issue, look to turn on each cache in turn to test where the bottleneck lies.
Choosing the Right WordPress Caching Plugin: 5 Options
I want to take a look at some WordPress caching plugins now, but be mindful that this isn’t a full list. It even misses out some plugins that do cache sites but not as its primary functionality, or offers related functionality.
For instance, WP-Optimize streamlines databases, but also includes caching. Autoptimze doesn’t claim to be a WordPress caching plugin, but it does handle file minification where a caching plugin might not.
1. W3 Total Cache: Best For In-Depth Caching Customization
W3 Total Cache is one of the stalwarts of WordPress caching plugins. It has longevity, power within its options, and has a free version that arguably offers most functionality. It’s also one of the first caching plugins users will gravitate to when they build a site, as it gets lots of recommendations.
I used W3 Total Cache for my first WordPress website, and enjoyed the feeling of having all of that scope at my fingertips. However, I’d advise other new sites to potentially shy away from this plugin and look at another option. The reason is that it has a lot of settings under the hood. I’d argue there’s too much going on to be valuable to new users. Even developers may not want to tinker with the entire settings panel.
However, if you do need this flexibility and scope, W3 Total Cache could be the best option available. It includes different caching options, but also provides file minification, the ability to leverage different CDNs, and even offers GZIP compression. In a nutshell, this is another way to reduce file sizes to send them across the web faster.
On the whole, W3 Total Cache can be great for your site—it certainly gives you almost all of the tools you need. However, other plugins can also give you plenty.
2. WP Rocket: Comprehensive Caching Options in a Premium Package
WP Rocket is unique in that it’s a premium-only WordPress caching plugin, yet it’s just as popular as free solutions. Arguably, the plugin can hang with the competition when it comes to performance and includes a stellar User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI).
It contrasts with a plugin such as W3 Total Cache in that the options you have are comprehensive, yet the presentation of those options is much easier to navigate:
To me, the development team is also more engaged with its community and with WP Rocket’s feature set. There are regular updates, and the plugin often includes the functionality users want rather than what the developers want to provide. This is one area that can really matter when choosing any solution, and WP Rocket delivers in spades.
For more on WP Rocket, check out the full review elsewhere on the site. It goes into much more detail about what to expect when using the plugin.
3. WP Super Cache: A Straightforward WordPress Caching Plugin That Delivers
The WordPress team often builds plugins to help you expand upon the ‘vanilla’ experience of the platform. This stretches to the Automattic team too. WP Super Cache is its take on boosting that corner of your site, and it does an admirable job.
After my initial dalliance with W3 Total Cache, I made the switch to WP Super Cache because I wanted to lean on better integration and support within the WordPress ecosystem. A secondary consideration for me was to have a slimline experience, and WP Super Cache is great at this. For instance, you use a radio button to turn caching on or off:
However, this doesn’t mean the plugin offers limited functionality. The Advanced section provides a multitude of options, and you can also turn caching on here too:
I like a number of things about WP Super Cache’s approach to the process:
- If you want to leverage caching without worrying about the technical aspects, you can do that through the Simple Cache Delivery Method.
- Alternatively, you can control lots of aspects of your caching provision through switching to Expert mode.
- The interface is nice to use, and contrasts to W3 Total Cache by giving your a wealth of options, yet without overwhelm.
- I like the extra CDN support too, and the simple options panel.
In all, this is the free plugin I recommend for most sites. It can scale with your ability and site needs. For instance, at first, you can use the Simple mode to apply caching. Once your needs become greater and you learn more about how to apply caching settings, you can expand through the Expert mode. Regardless, you’ll have excellent caching available to you that integrates well with WordPress.
4. WP Fastest Cache: An Alternative Plugin that Performs Well
WP Fastest Cache is one of many alternatives to some of the popular WordPress caching plugins. I’d argue that W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, and WP Super Cache generally take the majority of the attention from users. However, there are other options available to you where none of these choices fit your needs.
WP Fastest Cache straddles a line between all of the options so far. It offers a ‘cleaner’ approach to caching than W3 Total Cache. The plugin offers similar options to WP Super Cache. It costs less than WP Rocket. In my opinion, it can be even better than all three of these.
I’m not the biggest fan of the interface, as it’s basic and heavy on ads (in the free version):
Still, I do like how the plugin gives you the options with no fuss. That’s going to skyrocket your efficiency. It’s straightforward to tick the boxes you need, and also click to read the guidance for each option. I’d even go as far as saying I’d choose WP Fastest Cache over W3 Total Cache, but this is subjective. It’s great WordPress gives us options to tailor our sites!
5. Super Page Cache: Static Caching in Combination with Cloudflare
If you work with a ThemeIsle product, you know you will get quality in a cost-effective package. Super Page Cache is another one from the development team that focuses on site caching.
It has a similar ‘vibe’ to another product from ThemeIsle—Optimole. Here’s a quick overview of both:
- Super Page Cache. This is more of a typical caching plugin that leverages Edge Caching on Cloudflare. It includes options for all sorts of functions, such as page exclusions, preloading, logging, media and image optimization, and much more.
- Optimole. This packages up the functionality of a CDN, so it’s more for your media, but if offers more than that. The plugin also scales and serves the right images to the end device. There’s crossover with Super Page Cache’s media settings, but you can use both plugins for a full-featured experience.
I like the idea of combining both of these, because media assets can be just as much of a drain on resources as site files. Either way, the focus is on Super Page Cache here, not Optimole.
Back on topic, I think this plugin competes with W3 Total Cache more than any other. My one criticism is that the interface is overwhelming. There are so many options and I could see how many site owners won’t want to deal withthis level of complexity.
When it comes to its caching capabilities though, you have the most comprehensive plugin around. Super Page Cache’s relationship with Cloudflare is a unique touch, and it means you can guarantee your provision will be quality.
Which WordPress Caching Plugin You Should Choose Depending on Your Needs
Like practically every WordPress site owner, I first used W3 Total Cache because that was most prominent. There appeared to be some stagnation and persistent bugs that meant switching to something else made sense for me.
WP Super Cache had pride of place on my business site up until I made the switch to a SpinupWP and DigitalOcean setup. I’m ecstatic with this combination, and I also didn’t need a dedicated caching plugin any more.
When choosing your caching plugin, take note of the host you’re with and whether they allow for those solutions. I think that most sites won’t need W3 Total Cache for most use cases, and WP Super Cache does deliver. WP Rocket is awesome to if you have the budget. As such, I’d likely go with Super Page Cache or WP Super Cache if I need to implement this again.
Wrapping Up
Caching is a complex technology that WordPress boils down into a toggle switch within a plugin. This is great news for most of us, as we can rely on developer knowledge and expertise without needing to acquire it. It also means we need to carry out research on which WordPress caching plugin is right for a particular site.
The truth is that the right plugin will be unique for your site, and means you may even run different plugins across your network of websites. I already sum up my favorites, but also consider that your web host could also provide caching functionality for you. This means you may not even need a plugin at all.
If you have any questions about choosing a WordPress caching plugin, drop it to me in the comments section below—I’ll do my best to give you the answer!
43 Responses
I love WP Rocket it has made such a difference to the sites I have created
Thank you very much, these caching plugin guide actually helps me a lot more than I thought.
have any of you heard abot this new plugin called WOT CACHE? i heard alot of good things about it did anyone test it and can give reply?
Hello everyone,
I made a new caching plugin for WordPress called Borlabs Cache. You can try it for free
I also offer a Pro version with additional features like cache preloading, database optimization, and many more.
If you have any questions or feedback, you can contact me 🙂
Thanks for sharing Mark, great article! I totally agree that the utilization of Caching Plugins is a perfect way to greatly improve the page loading time of your website. I think our latest blog post might be of interest to you as it also discusses the same subject of Caching Plugins and we mention a few more less popular but very useful as well. Having your feedback regarding the article would be an honour for us.
wpCache WordPress https Cache
I really like ur article n I have learned alot from this post
w3 total cache is a good plugin, but it has a lot of options which is not easy for every one to understand. On the other hand wp rocket is easy to use, but now it seems not as good as i use it before. i am having minify CS JS issue with wp rocket.
The WordPress plug-in WP Smush Image Optimizer is very popular, not tried it myself as I do it manually.
I was tempted to try Wp-rocket as it seemed it didn’t need much configuration. However and I eventually went with W3 Total Cache and a free Cloudflare setup.
I initially struggled to get my site below 2 seconds load speed time but a couple of hours tweaking the configuration the cache plugin, I managed to get below 1 second.
My homepage is quite image heavy and over 500K in size, but even with my cheap hosting it load pretty quick.
Very pleased I went with W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare option
Could you tell me how you did that? I’m using a free Cloudflare plan and W3 Total Cache, and averaging around 2-3 seconds.
MMOByte
I get 2.4 seconds on gtmetrix.com with a homepage size of 1.57MB.
Page size is your biggest problem and it’s all down to your images.
Your Path to Exile image is 228K, your images are full size, 960 by 320 in the above case, yet it only takes up about 300 pixels of your screen (width wise).
Here’s what you need to do. I downloaded it, compressed and resized it and got the size down from 226K to just 11K.
I used 30% compression and resized it to 300 x 225 and it you can’t tell the difference in quality.
You have got 9 images like this, optimize them all and you will see a big improvement in your site speed.
That’s actually very useful information for all of us. 🙂 I always tend to forget about image size on my website(s). Reducing their filesize (along with banner/logo filesize) is always a problem of mine.
Do you know of a good plugin to automatically resize images?
I use WP Super Cache and it seems to work well…But I wasn’t aware of W3 Total cache until I read your article (thank you) so I’m going to install that and try it out on my next WordPress project.
I’ve been trying (quite hard) to get my website under a 1 second load, but it’s difficult. It was originally 6 seconds+, which is fairly bad. I got it down to 4 seconds with WP Total Cache, however, using WP-Rocket with Cloudflare has gotten it down to about 1.4-2 seconds.
Is there anything further I could do to push it down a half second? I’ve seen other websites with the same theme as me with their website loading faster.
I have a dedicated server for the website – and it’s fairly strong. Is it just a case of having the server in a bad part of the world? The Netherlands, that is.
Mark Thank you for your review
There is a new cache in town that will be quickly climbing to the top of the pile. Litespeed has recently released a WordPress Cache Plugin that offers staggering performance. We did a quick comparison of this new cache and WP Super Cache and Litespeeds new WordPress Cache doubles the performance of WP Super Cache.
You can see the comparison here:
@Mark Zahara
If you are interested in testing this plugin just let us know on our main site.
You should try my WP plugin for Varnish integration
I use WP Rocket for all my sites, I find it very easy to set up and worth the price you pay. I highly recommend it.
Hi
In addition to the above, I would like to recommend another great plugin, called WP Superformance (one of the newer plugins), as an alternative – especially to those looking for a solution without the hassle, learning curve, or unnecessary configs. This plugin weighs less than 50KB and does its job better than most. It also handles a myriad of performance tasks – which one would generally need 15 plugins for. Has a load of features, such as lazyloading, HTML, CSS, JS minification, hotlink protection, browser caching, etc. This one is well-worth a try.
I just wanted to warn people, caching is a complex concept and be careful being seduced by the wp-rocket ‘one click hype’. I had various issues with minification which they initially solved. However, with an update to their own plugin 2 months after I bought it, images stopped loading in certain browsers.
I had a lot of back and forth with wp-rocket support (mind you they are not native English speakers) and there was so much miscommunication it was staggering. They did not troubleshoot my issue thoroughly and I wasted many hours on emails getting nowhere. I requested a refund. Their policy is that after 30 days refunds aren’t possible so I ended up disputing with PayPal to refund 10 months worth of wp-rocket’s value. I am waiting for PayPal to decide.
I was using W3 total cache before and have switched back after removing wp-rocket. W3 total cache is definitely faster than wp-rocket and more customizable so ultimately more powerful since you can specify whether to use memcache, object cache, disk etc.
Thanks for the comment and the feedback. This issue seems to have been dealt with by Jean Baptiste from WP Rocket. You can find the reply here – https://wpmayor.com/wp-rocket-review/
My money got refunded yes but the issue wasn’t resolved. I offered them a live test site that they could troubleshoot and actually fix the problem but they weren’t interested after they refunded me. Varnish is the superior caching solution for me anyway. I discovered this easy way to warm up your Varnish cache and intelligently refresh it so you never have to purge. For me Varnish renders any WordPress caching plugin moot.
Superb Article…Really a Nice Read 🙂 I am a speedup guy myself on Fiverr 😉
I made a list of plugins which as a combination can improve the loading time a lot.
It is based on my experience on 54 client websites which came for speedup to me.
Please Checkout:
Thanks again Mark for the Article 🙂
Thanks for the feedback Felix! Will definitely take a look at your post 🙂
Mark! Awesome! Maybe in a future post you could do a speed case study? Where you take one of your own pages or a test page and try the various caching solutions and show us the results! That would be awesome! Do you think if I tried that myself, would deleting and uninstalling each plugin leave any “residual” settings that could impact each plugin’s performance? Thank you! And great article
Thanks Jared! Yes I’d definitely want to try that out at some time, I just need to have the time to set it up 🙂 Not sure about the residual settings or anything of the sort to be honest. It would be best to ask each plugin’s developer about that to be 100% sure.
You can tweak your website in more than hundred ways to make it load faster, however installing a cache plugin is the most effective way to reduce your loading time. Cloudways have listed 5 of the best WP Cache Plugins here: .
These are listed:
W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes
WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh and Automattic
WP Fastest Cache by EmreVona
ZenCache by WebSharks, JasWSInc, and RaamDev
WP Rocket by Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, Jonathan Buttigieg, and Julio Potier
Thanks for the feedback fahadrafiqgt. Another good list right there.
I’ve been using W3 Total Cache for the last year, however, never noticed too large of an increase in speed of my website(s). I am interested in WP Rocket, however, and have heard good things about it.
Do you know if it works with Cloudflare? The reason I’ve been using W3 Total Cache for so long is due to its Cloudflare support.
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
~Gale.
Yes it works with Cloudflare, all my sites I manage use CloudFlare and now WP-Rocket. Some sites now get sub 1 second load time with the combo.
WP Rocket works really well, using it with Varnish on two WooCommerce stores.
Thanks for the feedback! Good to know of another satisfied customer for WP Rocket – seems like there are a lot of satisfied customers out there.
Hi, what does Varnish do in combination with WP Rocket? I have a Woocommerce shop and like to install WP Rocket, but am a bit scared since I am not that technical (only know CSS) :). Thanks!
WP Rocket has a price, but it is so simple to set up that I use on every wordpress website I have to build !
Agreed Eric, sometimes it’s better to pay that little bit extra for better quality, especially in this case.
Thanks for your article!
I’m using plugin “WP Optimize By xTraffic” to optimize my site. This also good plugin you should try for your WordPress site 🙂
You’re welcome Peter. That looks like a good plugin too, but focused on SEO optimization rather than caching like the ones mentioned in the article. Worth a look though.
This is a really useful article, thanks for taking the time. I have always used W3 Total Cache but have heard a few tales of plugin conflicts. I will definitely look at WP Rocket.
I prefer WP-Rocket even though it comes at a Price.
But its still a lot simpler than most of the other Cache plugins.
Thanks for the feedback everyone! Glad to hear WP-Rocket is working out for so many of you, it really is easy to use and works great. For those of you who are interested I had also reviewed it just a couple of months ago right here on WP Mayor:
https://wpmayor.com/wp-rocket-review/
I was having site load time issues on a few of the sites I manage and never have been a fan of any caching plugin for a variety of reasons. Last night I came across a post about wp-rocket and went and purchased a personal license to try it out. Within 3 minutes of installing, the site went from load times of about ~13 seconds to under 2! I then upgrade to unlimited license and installing on all 30+ sites I manage, clients are going to be happy.
Easy interface, most of all if I am having an issue with a script on a specific page, all I have to do is copy and past the URL into the admin section and it does the rest, I dont have to chase down the script myself, very easy.
Well worth the premium price, without question.
I host most of my stuff on SiteGround and use their caching plugin (which is awesome) but for sites that I host elsewhere, I use Hyper Cache Extended, which is super simple to set up for those of us that want the quick and easy route