Does your personal or business website run on WordPress? Do you want to increase its loading speed? If your answer to these questions is “yes” then you should consider installing a caching plugin which is one of the best ways to ensure that your WordPress website loads faster.
Statistically, more than half of your website’s visitors expect your site to load in less than three seconds. This is the primary reason why Google and other search engines continue to emphasize site speed in their search algorithms.
The main purpose of a caching plugin is to generate static HTML pages of your site and save on your server. Each time a user tries to access your website; the plugin loads the lighter HTML page instead of processing the heavier and slower WordPress PHP scripts.
So, what are some of the best WordPress caching plugins that you should consider installing?
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WP caching plugin in the market today. This plugin is light and beginner-friendly which comes in handy if you don’t want to stress yourself with the technical terms used for different caching options. What is even more interesting is the fact that this plugin allows you to cache your site with a single click.
The plugin is designed with a simple crawler that automatically fetches all your WordPress pages to build up your site cache. WP Rocket plugin also recommends ideal WordPress caching settings such as page cache, cache pre-loading, and the gzip compression.
It is loaded with a wide range of optional features such as CDN support minification, and DNS pre-fetching that you can always turn to improve performance.
WP Super Cache
This is a popular caching plugin that is easy to install and use. The WP Super Cache generates static HTMLfiles from your dynamic site and provides gzip compression.
This caching plugin allows you to use your subdomain as a CDN for serving static files such as JavaScript, images, and CSS from another CDN or site. If you are a relatively new user with average needs, this plugin will be the best option for you.
Breeze
Breeze is a free WordPress cache plugin that boasts of thousands of active installs. The primary reason why many site owners prefer Breeze plugin is that it is easy to use and it also does its job quite well.
The plugin promises to deliver static files to up to 99.9% of your site visitors without compromising on the speed. The Breeze plugin excels in performance, simplicity, and convenience.
One thing that distinguishes Breeze from the other caching plugins is that it comes with built-in Varnish support. For beginners, all you have to do is enable minification of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript in the basic options and the plugin will start working.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is perhaps the only WordPress performance optimization plugin that is designed to improve page load times and boost overall user experience at the same time. This plugin is highly recommended by some of the top hosting providers all over the world.
The settings area of the plugin is divided into 16 pages, but the most critical thing to remember is that you don’t have to configure everything manually. The default settings work pretty well.
The W3 Total Cache plugin has a dedicated settings page for every type of WP caching such as object caching, page caching, browser caching, database caching, etc.
Comet Cache
Comet cache is another popular WP caching plugin with over 60,000 active installs. Unlike the other caching plugins discussed in this post, the Comet Cache plugin comes with the ability to cache logged-in users.
It means that if you are running an eCommerce site, membership site, or any other website that requires users to register, then Comet cache is your go-to plugin.
The plugin utilizes browser caching with the Apache server which offers you an opportunity to increase the page speed by simply avoiding multiple roundtrips between the browser and server.