In this article, We are going to discuss basic of caching and what are the best caching plugins for WordPress. This post will help you pick the best cache and cleaning cache plugin for your WordPress website.
The article will help you understand
- What is caching
- Top caching plugin of 2017
- WP-Rocket
- WP Super Cache
- WP Total Cache
- What is clearing cache
- Top two cache clear plugins
- BB Delete Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
- Conclusion
The users and search engines tend to like the speedy loading websites. I hope you made a beautiful, functional, and content worth website. Your website lacks in one area speed! And it performs terrible in loading speed.
What would you do to improve this? Well, there are many technical ways to achieve higher loading speed. And this blog about helping you make your website load faster.
Before we proceed any further, please make sure that you have gone through the images you are using on your website. In majority of the cases, images or rather high definition images contributes to the poor loading speed.
tinypng.com/ is a free online service to reduce the size of your images without losing any quality. We are using this free service for a long time to compress images for our blog.
To best address the image issue, I would recommend you finalize the max image width you use across your website. If it’s 800px you better use the same resolution across your website(except the slider images).
Secondly, lower the pixel density of all your images. Combining both the smaller width and pixel density images will help you lower the web page size.
Okay, so you did that, right? Now it comes to the important part. The caching part. Now, what is caching?
What is caching?
Caching is basically to store the page information on some sort of storage. Hard-disk storage in most case and memory storage in some cases.
It makes the page retrieval very fast as the web server doesn’t have to make a trip to data server, and the client browser don’t have to ask for the static resources like images, CSS, and js.
Combining all makes the page loading very fast. Let me give you an example, if you tell a phone number or an email address of a person JOHN and if I ask you to recall his number/email after like a minute or so, what will be your response like?
You will be prompt, right? It’s in your memory. You don’t need to make a lookup to your directory or mobile phone or any other storage! This exactly happens with the cache for your website!
Your website’s server, web server and the client requesting for your website has some/majority of the static data in cache (it’s memory). It makes retrieval very fast.
You may have a question, the cache thing looks pretty legit. How come you integrate this in your real website? Well, as your website is build on top of WordPress framework, integrating the Cache is real quick thing.
01 WP-Rocket
It’s one of the best caching service your can avail for your website right now. It’s indeed a premium service, but spending $38 a year considering the performance gain you receive and easy of use and operation. It’s worth of every penny.
It makes caching an easy task for you. Caching your website pages are just a single click operation here. By caching the pages it helps you reduce those time expensive database trips.
It enables the gzip compression to save the bandwidth and time. It makes the media resource like images and videos loading a lazy loading process. It’s the same thing you may have experienced with the facebook and twitter. Very effective. There are many more features. It’s worth a consideration for sure.
02 WP Super Cache
Are you looking for a free caching plugin to start your caching journey? Well, you can’t go wrong with WP Super Cache plugin. I personally have started my journey with this plugin.
It has over 1 Million active installations, regular updates, and it’s backed by the Automattic the very same company behind the WordPress framework.
The plugin creates the HTML version of all your pages and posts. And thereby it saves those expensive trip to database pulling the data for each of requested pages and posts. It serves the cached HTML version of pages to almost 99% of your website visitors.
It’s up to you who will receive the cached version and who will receive the fresh copy of the pages. The registered users who have made comments or replied to comments may need to see the latest version of the page. You can do this by disabling the cache for registered members of site.
The CDN support, cache rebuild, PHP caching, and extra home page checks are some of the best and most recommended features you should consider applying after installing and activating the plugin.
03 W3 Total Cache
This is another finest and widely used caching plugin on WordPress framework. It has over 1 Million active downloads and 4.3 out of 5-star rating. You will find a detailed configuration guide for this plugin. And, it’s free! If I haven’t tell you earlier.
It has one of the easiest method of integrating CDN services on your WordPress websites. And if you are using the very popular KeyCDN or MaxCDN service, the integration becomes a few clicks operation.
It supports the Google’s latest Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) for mobile visitors. It supports caching of your pages, posts, categories, tags, CSS, and javascript on memory, disk, or on CDN.
Meaning it can cache your resources on any medium you may be using including the CDN one! This by far one of my favorite caching plugin.
The features, functionality, customization, tutorials and community support you get with this plugin is just outstanding.
Why you need cache clear plugin?
Okay, so we have seen some of the finest caching plugins. Caching is good to improve your overall page’s and website’s performance. But they also make the website changes reflection slower!
Meaning if you change some styling in your CSS, change an image, minor change in content, or add some functionality in one of your JavaScript file. You might not get the immediate effect!
This is obvious behavior because we have asked our caching plugin to do two things, one we asked it to cache the HTML version of the page and the second we directed the visitor’s browser to cache the static resources like CSS, js, and images.
This makes the change reflection pretty slow. You or your visitors may see the changes only after those browser cache gets deleted or when they hit the expiration time.
But you have another way of addressing this issue. The way obviously an easy one like installing and configuring a plugin on your WordPress website. Here are two of widely used and my favorite cache cleaning plugins.
There is no doubt that all these mentioned plugins come with clear cache functionality. But the clear all cache option is organized in some nested menu which would be hard to find.
You may find it hard to trace it when you are in rush to see the output of the change you just have made.
4. BB Delete Cache
This might be the easiest way to clear cache. Installing the plugin will give you an option on your admin panel.
Cleaning the cache is just a button click away task! Based on my finding, the plugin offers clearing cache for the post/page you are working on.
It makes more sense deleting the cache for the page/post you are working on as you are probably making the changes to that only item. And you are interested in observing the change on that page.
The plugin also gives you an option to delete the cache for the entire website. Again a click away operation right from the admin bar!
I would recommend you use the cache plugin’s clear cache operation in serious case scenarios. But this plugin is good enough to clean cache on the go.
5. WP Fastest Cache
This might be the straightforward cache cleaner plugin, as this is a caching plugin itself. If you are not sure about which caching plugin to start with, I would recommend you consider this plugin seriously.
This plugin may require minimal configurations and settings. Installing and activating it just works! The plugin has over 200K active installations with over 4.8 stars.
The plugin solves both of your concerns, caching and cleaning cache. It offers an admin panel shortcut. Hitting the clear cache would clear website cache entirely.
The plugin is flexible and offers various customization like, it allows you to set whether or not you want caching to work for your mobile visitors, logged in users, blocking cache for certain post/page, cache timeout, resource minification, SSL & CDN support, and may others…
Conclusion:
Website caching would be the answer to your slow loading and performing website. Caching would help you increase your website performance if your website is hosted on shared hosting environment.
Hey Darshan,
You have come up with the great list of caching plugins.I am using Wp super Cache but now i am thinking to go with WP rocket with the premium version. WP super cache is not so bad for removing sites cache, but i want more secure way. Thanks for this listing. I have read all the review of WP rocket and want to go with it.