WordPress Caching Plugin, Speeding up your website is very important to stay in competition, if the website loads faster, your visitor will stay longer on your site and enjoys browsing so your website will get high traffic, means your bounce rate decrease and the earning will increase, for WordPress users one the best method to increase speed and performance is using plugins.
WordPress does not have a system for speed optimization by default. That’s why you need a powerful plugin that speeds up WordPress with technical and advanced features, one of the most important ways to improve site speed is to use a WordPress caching plugin.
What is Caching
In simple words, caching refers to the process of creating static versions of your website content, and serving that to visitors. Static pages are generally rendered quickly in browsers. This will improve your site speed and performance.
Types Of Caching:
Browser caching: can help to reduce server load by reducing the number of requests per page. The browser cache is a temporary storage location on your computer which holds the most recently visited Web pages. so if you visit the same page the browser won’t send a request to the server hence it will retrieve the page from the local storage, so it will speeds up browsing and increase user experience.
Web server caching: a web cache is a hardware or software applications for temporarily storing frequently accessed static pages( such as images, HTML, js, CSS) for example Web Browsers, CDN (Content Delivery Networks) and Proxy Server, are some of the type of web server caching.
WordPress Caching Plugin
So I hope all of you gain some knowledge about caching, now let us see some of the best WordPress caching plugins you can implement on your WordPress site to improve speed and performance.
1 WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a popular free WordPress caching plugin that’s been around for a while, since a WordPress website is rendered through PHP and MySQL it requires RAM and CPU usage each time the page is requested from the server, this plugin creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog, when a page is rendered, PHP and MySQL are used and with a simple user interface which allows easy to install and configure the plugin.
Features:
- Mod_Rewrite which is the fastest method is used in this plugin
- Admin can delete all cached files from the options page
- Preload Cache – Create the cache of all the site automatically
- Supports CDN and SSL
2 Litespeed Cache
Litespeed cache is one of the most rated WordPress server level caching plugins with collections of optimization features, and it supports WordPress multisite and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins, this plugin having two features one is general features and other Litespeed exclusive features, the general features may be used by anyone with any web server (LiteSpeed, Apache, Nginx, etc.) but LiteSpeed Exclusive Features require OpenLiteSpeed, commercial LiteSpeed products, or LiteSpeed-powered hosting.
General Features
- Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis)
- Image Optimization and Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Lazyload images/iframes
- Multiple CDN support and Database Cleaner and Optimizer
- OPcode Cache and Single Site and Multi-Site (Network) support
Litespeed Exclusive Features
- Automatic page caching and Automatic page caching
- Private cache for logged-in users and Separate caching of desktop and mobile views
- WooCommerce and bbPress support
- Exclude from the cache by URI, Category, Tag, Cookie, User Agent
3 Hummingbird Page Speed Optimization
Hummingbird is the most popular and high-performance optimization plugin for WordPress. Once activated, it scans your site for potential speed improvements and provides fine-tuned controls for file compression, minification and full-page, browser and Gravatar caching, Hummingbird will scan your site, find files that are slowing it down and provide tips and fixes for making your site run at top speed, which helps to load your pages quicker and score higher on Google PageSpeed Insights.
Features
- Performance Reports – Pro tips for running your site at the super speed
- Asset Optimization – Position, minify and combine files for top performance
- Caching Suite – Load pages faster with full-page, Gravatar and browser cache tools
- GZIP Compression – Blazing fast HTML, JavaScript, and stylesheet transfer
4 Fast Velocity Minify
Fast Velocity Minify plugin reduces HTTP requests by merging CSS & Javascript files into groups of files while attempting to use the least amount of files as possible. It minifies CSS and JS files with PHP Minify (no extra requirements), minification is done in real time, this plugin includes options for developers and advanced users, however, the default settings should work just fine for most sites.
Features
- Merge JS and CSS files into groups to reduce the number of HTTP requests
- Google Fonts merging and optimization and Keeps the order of the scripts even if you exclude some files from minification
- Minifies CSS and JS with PHP Minify only, no third party software or libraries needed.
- Option to Minify HTML for further improvements and Ability to turn off minification
- Support for conditional scripts and styles, multisite installations, gzip_static on Nginx and CDN Enabler plugin
5 Autoptimize
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default (but can also defer), moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML, If you consider performance important, you really should use one of the many caching plugins to do page caching.
Features
- Aggregation of files
- Minification of files
- Caching of files
- Defers scripts to the footer
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) integration
6 Comet Cache
Comet Cache takes a real-time snapshot (building a cache) of every Page, Post, Category, Link, etc. These snapshots are then stored (cached) intuitively so they can be referenced later, Comet Cache uses advanced techniques that allow it to recognize when it should and should not serve a cached version of the file, Comet Cache is extremely reliable, because it runs completely in PHP code, and does not hand important decisions off to the mod_rewriteengine or browser cache; also making Comet Cache MUCH easier to setup and configure.
Features
- Options to control the automatic cache clearing behavior for Home and Posts Page, Author Page, Category, Tag, and Custom Term Archives, Custom Post Type Archives, RSS/RDF/ATOM Feeds, and XML Sitemaps.
- URI exclusion patterns (now supporting wildcards too).
- User-Agent exclusion patterns (now supporting wildcards too), HTTP referrer exclusion patterns (now supporting wildcards too), The ability to set an automatic expiration time for cache files and Client-Side Caching (to allow double-caching in the client-side browser).
- Apache Optimizations to enable GZIP Compression. and WP-CLI Compatibility.
Pro Features
- The ability to cache logged-in users too! (VERY powerful, particularly for membership sites)
- Options for Automatic and Intelligent Cache Clearing of Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types, Categories, Tags, Links, Themes, Users, and more.
- Multisite Host Exclusion Patterns to exclude specific child blogs from being cached in a Multisite Network
- Static CDN Filters to serve some and/or ALL static files on your site from a CDN of your choosing, including support for Multiple CDN Host Names, Domain Sharding, and WordPress Multisite Networks.
- Cache Statistics and Charts to analyze statistics about the page cache, HTML Compressor cache, PHP OPCache, and server health
- Apache Optimizations to enable web server GZIP Compression, Leverage Browser Caching, Enforce Canonical URLs, and more.
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Final conclusion
Each plugin mentioned in this post has its own pros and cons, and an important thing is before testing any of these plugins or any other plugins, please don’t forget to take proper backup of your site so if anything goes wrong you can restore easily. recommended backup plugin “Updraft Plus”.
If you have any suggestions or opinions please comment below.