3 Best WordPress Caching Plugins Compared (2021)

Do you want to increase the speed of your WordPress website? Using a caching plugin on your website is one of the best ways to ensure your website loads faster.

Statistically speaking, nearly half of your website’s audience expects your site to load in less than 3 seconds. So it comes as no surprise that Google continues to emphasize site speed in its search algorithm. The higher the page speed, the better your search rankings.

Why Do You Need a WordPress Caching Plugin?

A caching plugin generates static HTML pages of your website and saves it on your server.

Each time a user tries to access your website, your caching plugin serves up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. This allows the caching plugin to tremendously improve your page loading time.

Let’s take a look at the best WordPress caching plugins available in the market.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress. The ease of configuration is what sets WP Rocket apart from its competition. Once you activate the plugin, page caching will immediately be activated.

A few more benefits of using WP Rocket are:

  • Indexing your website on search engines will be improved.
  • To improve page load time, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files are minified.
  • Lazy loading is applied to your images, meaning your images are loaded only when they’re visible to your visitors on their browser.
  • It comes with loads of hooks that help developers easily extend its features.

Price: Starts at $49 for a single site license.

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WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is another popular caching plugin for WordPress, with over a million active installs. The plugin is run by Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com.

WP Super Cache helps you generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After processing comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts on your site, WP Super Cache serves the static HTML file to the vast majority of your website visitors.

WP Super Cache serves cached files in 3 ways:

  • Simple: This is the most recommended method of file caching because you don’t have to edit PHP files, plus the .htaccess file does not need to be configured.
  • Expert: This is the fastest caching method to serve super cached HTML files to users, but requires a modification of your .htaccess files.
  • WP Super Caching: This method is used to cache pages for known users (the ones who log into your site, leave comments, etc.). Though it’s the most flexible caching method, it’s slightly slower compared to other methods.

Price: Free

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W3 Total Cache

With over a million active installs, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It improves your server performance by caching every aspect of your site and also offers content delivery network integrations.

It’s been used and recommended by countless companies and publications like AT&T, MattCutts.com, Mashable.com, and many others. Whether your site is hosted on a shared hosting network or a dedicated server, you’ll find the plugin helpful to improve your web server performance and reduce page load time. Currently, it’s the only plugin designed to optimize all practical hosting environments.

It offers support for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

The developers claim that the plugin can offer up to 80% bandwidth savings via minification, the process of reducing the size of your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and feeds without having a negative impact.

Price: Free

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