Everyone wants to load his or her website in the shortest possible time. A fast website can rank higher in search engine results and get more page visits from searches, social sites, and other referral channels. If your site takes a long time to load, it will seriously affect your traffic and income.
Caching helps you to serve content faster and enhance the overall website performance. Many web hosts provide a built-in caching system to speed up your WordPress. But sometimes, it may not be enough. In such a situation, you may need to install a third-party caching plugin on your site to reduce page loading time.
Today, we pick 7 best WordPress caching plugins that can boost your page speed significantly.
What’s Caching?
Every webpage is a combination of HTML, JavaScript, CSS files and scripts. Your theme and plugins will add some coding scripts to the front-end for smooth functioning. All such things should be properly loaded to open your site as expected.
When a visitor enters a URL, a request sends from the browser to the server to deliver relevant resources, then the hosting server process the call, and sends files back to the user browser. Since this kind of two-way communication is involved, your page loading time will increase based on the number of files needed to render a web page completely.
Caching is a process of your frequently accessed resources in a temporary storage so they can be served quickly to the users. It will help browsers to skip communicating with the servers and load pages faster.
By default, a WordPress content is generated dynamically. ie it loads all elements in a page including images, files, and scripts. When someone visits your page for the first time, the caching plugin saves its static version in the cache folder to makes it available to users quickly for subsequent visits. This is what WordPress caching plugins do on your website. Thus they will help you to reduce page loading time and speed up WordPress.
Best WordPress Caching Plugins 2023
There are several caching plugins available for WordPress in free and premium categories. Let us check the best of them.
1. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the #1 WordPress caching plugin with minification, database optimization, lazy loading functionalities. It is easy to use and starts optimizing your website from the very first moment of activation.
WP Rocket is a great choice for websites, eCommerce portals, and blogs to cache content and serve them at a blazing fast speed. It can also help you to minify and combine scripts to reduce the file size and deliver them faster. The plugin will automatically detect mobile devices and sends cached content to mobile visitors for improved performance. With WP Rocket, you can set a lifespan for cache files, after which it will delete existing files and generate new files for visitors.
Not only caching, WP Rocket can also handle many more tasks on your WordPress website. It can clean up your database, control WordPress heartbeat, and even fix several page speed test warnings easily.
Key Features
- Page caching
- Browser caching
- Cache preloading
- Mobile caching
- Optimize database in one-click and on schedule
- GZIP compression
- Google fonts optimization
- Minification
- Defer JS loading
- Regenerate critical CSS
- CDN
- Lazy load images and videos
- Disable emojis and WordPress embeds
- Preload fonts
- Advanced rules to exclude certain URLs, user agents, and cookies from caching
- Control, reduce, or disable Heartbeat activities
- Browser caching for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel
- Cloudflare and Sucuri integration
2. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is one of the popular WordPress caching plugins with more than 1 million downloads. It is a freemium plugin, but basic features are enough to reduce your page loading time and speed up the website.
W3 Total Cache is highly efficient in caching your pages, RSS feeds, archives, and comments. You can also set an expiry time to remove cached files and disable caching for certain user roles. It will also allow you to minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and defer scripts to open pages faster.
Key Features
- Page caching
- Database caching
- Browser caching
- Object caching
- Enable GZIP compression
- Set expires headers
- Minification
- Lazyload images
- Disable emojis
- CDN integration
- AMP
- Cloudflare integration
3. WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is another powerful choice for WordPress caching. It is easy to use and lets you enable caching and delete cached pages in one-click. The plugin is developed by Automattic, the brain behind the WordPress.com, Tumblr, and JetPack.
It is possible to disable caching for logged-in visitors and also, compress pages to reduce the size so you can deliver them smoothly. Set an expiry time for your cached files after which WP Super Cache will generate new static files and delete the existing files.
Key Features
- Cache and compress pages
- Browser caching
- Dynamic caching
- Set cache timeout
- CDN integration
4. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a simple and light-weight WordPress caching plugin with more than 1 million downloads. It is a freemium plugin and allows you to enable caching, minify and combine scripts, enable GZIP compression, etc. for free. If you want to activate more features like lazy load images and mobile caching, you should go for the premium version.
Key Features
- Page caching
- Browser caching
- Minify and combine scripts
- Cache preloading
- GZIP compression
- Disable emojis
5. LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache is a unique WordPress caching plugin for LiteSpeed servers. It is best for caching pages, purge cache, schedule purge URLs, and enable browser caching on your site. Thus, it will help you to create a fast website and bring more visits to your pages.
If you want to exclude certain URLs, categories, or user agents from caching, it is also possible with LiteSpeed Cache. It is totally free and easy to manage.
Key Features
- Page caching
- Mobile caching
- Browser caching
- Comment caching
- Minify and combine scripts
- Database optimization
- Image optimization
- Lazyload images
- PageSpeed score optimization
6. Asset CleanUp
Asset CleanUp is a great plugin to manage caching and increase your Google PageSpeed Insights score. It can minify, combine scripts and defer their loading to reduce your page loading time.
The main advantage of this plugin is that it can disable JavaScript and CSS files that affect your page rendering. Asset CleanUp automatically detects and list them on page-wise. You can either defer them with async/defer attributes or disable them in one-click.
From individual post optimization to custom taxonomies, it provides several options to disable unwanted scripts and features in simple steps. Asset CleanUp is free, but they also offer a premium version with more controls.
Key Features
- Minification
- Defer loading
- Object caching
- Optimize Google Fonts
- Disable emojis
- Disable plugins
- Disable scripts
7. Hummingbird
Hummingbird is an incredible WordPress caching plugin from WPMU DEV. It has a clean dashboard to manage caching, optimize various assets, and monitor your page performance from one place.
Hummingbird is a powerful tool to create static files of your content and store them on user browsers. Thus it helps you to process them faster and reduce the page loading time. It also allows you to cleanup the database in one-click or schedule it to automate the process.
Key Features
- Page audit
- Cache pages
- Browser caching
- Database optimization
- Image optimization
- GZIP compression
- Gravatar caching
Which is the best caching plugin for you?
No doubt. WP Rocket. It is a great WordPress caching plugin with an exceptional value and advanced features. The plugin works best for all kinds of websites, eCommerce portals, and blogs.
Here’s the proof.
This is my website’s GTMetrix scan report, before installing WP Rocket.
It had a PageSpeed Score of 91 and YSlow score of 87. The page fully loaded in 4.4 seconds. Then, I installed WP Rocket on the site and run the GTMetrix speed test again. Here’s the new statistics,
Now you can see the changes. Both the PageSpeed Score and YSlow Score are jumped to 95. The page loading time is decreased to 1.8 seconds. WP Rocket automatically fixed many speed test related warnings and increased the overall performance.
If your website is slow and facing caching issues, WP Rocket should be the first choice. It can enable caching (including mobiles), clean up database, minify scripts, and perform many more tweaks to create a faster website.
Click here to buy WP Rocket to enable caching and load your website in less than 1-second (14-days money-back guarantee)
