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It is estimated that 53% of web visitors will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile. A fast-loading site is crucial for your business. Slow sites increase bounce rates and negatively impact SEO. If you are a WordPress user, you can use some techniques to speed up your website. How?
The easiest way to resolve this issue is to install a WordPress cache plugin. What is the best caching plugin for your website, with many options available? I have compiled a list of the seven best WordPress cache plugins. First, I will discuss the importance of installing cache plugins, and then I will explain the features of these plugins. So that you can choose the right one according to your needs.
What is a Cache, and how do cache plugins work?
A cache is a temporary storage location used to save and store static copies of your site’s files. Using it, a visitor can access a web page faster. Information that is frequently requested is cached and stored in a temporary location. Computers can quickly access the file this way.
Caching can also improve performance and speed up WordPress websites. It is important to understand that WordPress is a dynamic content management system. WordPress fetches information from the database every time a user visits your website, then runs several other steps before sending the web page to the user’s browser.
A caching plugin allows you to eliminate many of the steps that are involved in generating a dynamically generated page in WordPress. You can enable server-side caching with caching plugins, such as page and object caching.
WordPress Cache Plugins to Improve your Core Web Vitals
Table of Contents
FlyingPress
With FlyingPress, you can cache pages, lazy load images, and optimize code with various tools. FlyingPress has revolutionized the way Core Web Vitals are optimized. Every CSS and other libraries that is used and critical is written from scratch to provide the best performance.
Furthermore, FlyingPress includes tools for cleaning and optimizing databases that can be run manually or automatically.
In addition, the FlyingCDN add-on improves the speed of loading websites by compressing, optimizing, and replicating global files. However, since I use Cloudflare Enterprise-supported hosting, I haven’t enabled FlyingCDN on this site.
The plugin authority is always looking for new ways to improve performance, and these are added to the plugin as soon as they have been tested to ensure that they work as anticipated.
I’ve been using FlyingPress for over a month now and my Core Web Vitals score on PageSpeed Insights has significantly improved.
Real User Experience:
I’m hopeful that after some weeks the average user experience of my site will improve considering that I am able to follow most of the guidelines to achieve 100/100 on Page Speed Insights.
PageSpeed Insights Score:
The User Interface is very clean and the cache settings are easy to understand; the FlyingPress documentation will also help you get started for beginners who are not familiar with technical terms.
Another useful feature that FlyingPress offer is the ability to Preload Links when the user hovers their mouse over internal links. I was using their free plugin called Flying Pages before which offered this Preloading links feature.
FlyingPress also lets you clean your Database automatically or manually and eliminate the need for an extra Database cleaner plugin.
FlyingPress settings I use on this site:
LiteSpeed Cache
This plugin works in a standard way across all different web hosts or web servers, but some of the exclusive LiteSpeed features only work on the LiteSpeed Web Server. WordPress on the LiteSpeed web server is faster than Nginx and Apache and it can handle more requests.
The LiteSpeed cache plugin offers server-level caching, so unless you’re highly geeky or are using LiteSpeed-friendly hosting, you’re not likely to use most of its features. However, if you are, the LiteSpeed plugin will make your site perform better.
You can either use a managed hosting provider like WPX or ChemiCloud to easily set up your site and install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, or you can set up your own OpenLiteSpeed web server using an affordable VPS and then installing WordPress by using a control panel such as CyberPanel.
This caching plugin offers a wide range of features and LiteSpeed’s exclusive features, making it a unique solution.
The ability to control the WordPress heartbeat and direct integration with Cloudflare make it a plugin worth considering. You can also use their free QUIC.cloud CDN which I think works better than Cloudflare for this plugin; QUIC.cloud CDN offers a complete caching solution that can catch both dynamic and static WordPress content.
I’ve been using this cache plugin on my LiteSpeed-powered WordPress Agency site AdithyaShetty.com and I was easily able to achieve 100/100 on PageSpeed Insights with few settings.
Earlier, you had to manually configure settings to get a good performance score, but now the LiteSpeed Cache plugin has a feature called Presets where you can configure your site in one click.
I’ve managed to get a 100/100 score on PageSpeed Insights by just clicking the Recommended Preset button.
WP Rocket
The WP Rocket plugin is one of WordPress’s popular premium performance plugins.
A bunch of features you probably wouldn’t expect are included, and the caching functionality you’d expect.
It has a very user-friendly interface and is easy to set up. We love that it includes features you normally need to install extra plugins. For example, you get lazy loading for images, database optimization, and even Google Analytics integration.
WP Rocket also has a notable feature called Preload Cache which will simulate a visit to the particular page your user is visiting, so the user will get a cached version of that page; this is similar to the Guest Mode feature offered in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
Page load times and Core Web Vitals can be greatly improved by delaying Javascript execution time. It will help you to uninstall other unnecessary plugins that you may have used to speed up your website. When it comes to speed optimization plugins that do it all, WP Rocket is well worth exploring.
W3 Total Cache
The plugin is compatible with most shared, virtual, and dedicated hosting plans.
W3 Total Cache minifies HTML, CSS, JavaScript files, posts, pages, and RSS feeds. In addition, you can lazy load images, defer CSS and JavaScript, and schedule automatic database cleanups.
Millions of users still utilize the plugin to improve the website speed. The quality of W3 Total Cache has undoubtedly improved since BoldGrid (a specialist WordPress company) acquired it in 2019.
There is a wide range of options and caching methods to choose from. A wide range of CDN services, including Cloudflare, are supported. But you have to be a pro user to get these add-on features.
The last time I used the W3 Total Cache plugin was when I was with WPX hosting.
WP Super Cache
Powered by Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com), this plugin will take care of your site’s cache needs. The WP Super Cache plugin is one of WordPress’s most widely used caching plugins. Over 2 million people have downloaded it as of this writing.
It’s easy to set up but has some advanced settings you can use to maximize its capabilities. It is a free plugin that offers support for multiple caching types (Mod_Rewrite, PHP, and Legacy), and serves static HTML files, cache preload, CDN support, and more.
WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a free speed-up plugin that is easy to use, doesn’t offer fancy thrills, but does its job well. It is one of the most well-known caching plugins for WordPress.
Many features are available with this plugin, including 1-click cache clearing and minifying CSS, setting posts/pages to exclude (some, like admin area, are excluded by default).
You can also set expiration times for all posts/pages or certain URL strings and provide CDN integration.
Perfmatters
The Perfmatters plugin improves page load times differently from most other plugins we have listed above.
Most sites don’t need specific options enabled by default, which slows down performance. You can disable these options with a few clicks in Perfmatters.
The biggest culprit for slowing down the rendering of your pages is unnecessary HTTP requests.
Additionally, you can disable these scripts on a page-by-page basis with this plugin. By doing this, you can prevent plugins from loading unnecessary code.
Also, DNS prefetch and local Google Analytics script hosting can boost performance.
Final Words
Hope this article will help you to select the Best WordPress cache plugin to improve your website speed. Whether you have a business website or blog, you should ensure that it provides a better user experience. By using one of these plugins, you can accelerate your WordPress website.
For most of my blogging career, I used a free cache plugin, mainly W3 Total Cache, and thought it was enough, but considering the significance of premium cache plugins like FlyingPress, I would say it’s worth spending some bucks to speed up your site and get some edge over your competitors.
