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, and the more organic traffic you can attract.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress caching plugins for your website.
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.
With caching plugins, you can:
- Increase your website’s speed and reduce page load time
- Improve user experience as everything works faster and smoother
- Boost SEO rankings as search engines love a fast loading site
Caching plugins handle all the technical work while you just have to click a few buttons to make your site incredibly faster. Now, let’s dive into the best caching plugins for WordPress.
9 Best WordPress Cache Plugins
- WP Rocket: Most Popular Premium Cache Plugin
- WP-Optimize: All-in-one WordPress Optimization Plugin
- SG Optimizer: Free WordPress Plugin by SiteGround
- WP Super Cache: Cache Plugin from WordPress.com
- W3 Total Cache: Developer Friendly WordPress Cache Plugin
- WP Fastest Cache: Simple Caching Plugin for WordPress
- Comet Cache: Free WordPress Caching Plugin
- Cache Enabler: Best Lightweight WordPress Cache Plugin
- Hyper Cache: Yet Another Free WordPress Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache: Best All-in-One Site Acceleration Plugin
- Autoptimize: Most Compatible Caching Plugin
Let’s take a look at the best WordPress caching plugins available on the market.
1. WP Rocket: Most Popular Premium Cache Plugin
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.
WP Rocket is loaded with features and is so simple to use. It’s without a doubt the best WordPress cache plugin.
Price: WP Rocket is a premium plugin for WordPress websites. It starts at $49 for a single site license.
Get started with WP Rocket today.
2. WP-Optimize: All-in-one WordPress Optimization Plugin
WP-Optimize is a freemium caching plugin, created by the same folks behind the legendary backup plugin, UpdraftPlus. It’s been used on almost a million websites worldwide.
WP-Optimize speeds up your WordPress site by cleaning your database, compressing your large images, and caching your site.
- Clean the database: This plugin clears out all the unnecessary data in your database, cleans up your tables, and ultimately makes your website fast and efficient.
- Image compression: Its image compression tool significantly reduces server resources by converting large images into compressed files and improves page loading time.
- Caching: It comes with all the essential features of any other caching plugin with minimal setup configuration.
Price: Free version available. Premium version starts at $49 per year.
Get started with WP-Optimize today!
3. SG Optimizer: Free WordPress Caching Plugin by SiteGround
SG Optimizer is a free caching plugin by SiteGround that’s available to download from WordPress.org. It’s built to connect your WordPress site with the SiteGround performance services. It is worth noting that this plugin will work only if you’ve hosted your website with SiteGround and will not work with any other hosts.
The plugin helps improve your website performance by various optimization techniques. Here are some of the features that it offers.
- It lets you configure your dynamic caching and Memcached. You can enable/disable the automatic cache purge and exclude URLs from the cache. You also have the option to test your web pages if they are properly cached.
- It allows you to force HTTPS for your site and switch between different PHP versions. You can even enable/disable Gzip Compression and browser caching rules for your site.
- You have the option to enable/disable the minification of your HTML, JS and CSS resources. It lets you remove the Emoji support and the query strings from your static resources.
- You can also optimize your images individually or in bulk.
Price: Free
Get started with SG Optimizer today!
4. WP Super Cache: Cache Plugin from WordPress.com
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
Get started with W3 Super Cache today.
5. W3 Total Cache: Developer Friendly WordPress Cache Plugin
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.
A few highlights of W3 Total Cache include:
- 10x improvement in overall site performance
- Content delivery network (CDN) integration
- Improved web server performance
- Sustain high traffic periods
Price: Free
Get started with W3 Total Cache today.
6. WP Fastest Cache: Simple Caching Plugin for WordPress
WP Fastest Cache comes with fewer configuration settings for WordPress caching, which makes it one of the easiest WordPress caching plugins available in the official WordPress plugins repository.
Just like any other caching plugin, it creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress site.
To reduce the size of files, the plugin minifies HTML and CSS files. It also allows you to disable emojis on your site. It effectively implements WordPress browser caching to reduce page load time for repeat visitors and combines many CSS files into one to reduce the number of HTTP round-trips.
The premium version of the plugin comes with a lot of unique features to increase your page speed, like image optimization, database cleanup, mobile caching, and a lot more.
After you installed the free WP Fastest Cache plugin, you can purchase the premium version directly from your WordPress dashboard.
A few highlights of WP Fastest Cache plugin include:
- Admin control to delete cached files
- Enable/Disable cache option for mobile devices
- SSL and CDN support
- Preload cache and WP-CLI cache clearing
Price: Both free and premium versions are available. The price is hidden from the website and can be seen after you click the buy button embedded inside your free plugin.
Get started with WP Fastest Cache today.
7. Comet Cache: Free WordPress Caching Plugin
Comet Cache is another popular caching plugin with 60,000 active installs. Unlike other caching plugins, Comet Cache comes with the ability to cache logged-in users too. That means if you’re running a membership site, eCommerce site, or any other sites that require users to register, then Comet Cache is a must-use plugin for you.
The plugin uses WordPress browser caching with the Apache server, meaning you can increase the page speed by avoiding multiple roundtrips between the server and browser.
You can also serve all cached files on your site from the content delivery network (CDN) of your choice. It supports popular CDN networks like CloudFront, MaxCDN, and more.
To avoid generating a new version of the cache while your server is busy, the plugin monitors the server load and temporarily disables cache expiration.
The plugin also shows you cache statistics to help you gain insight into the status of your site cache.
A few highlights of Comet Cache plugin include:
- Control the automatic cache clearing behavior
- Developer friendly
- WP-CLI Compatibility
- Simple and well-documentated configuration
Price: There’s a free version available. Comet Cache also has premium versions with more features. A single site license can be purchased for a one-time fee of $39.
Get started with Comet Cache today.
8. Cache Enabler: Best Lightweight WordPress Cache Plugin
Cache Enabler is a lightweight caching plugin that creates a static HTML file of your site and serves them to the vast majority of your website visitors upon request. It needs minimal configuration and comes with all the important features you’ll ever need from a caching plugin.
Unlike most free WordPress caching plugins, Cache Enabler provides extensive documentation that helps you explore the different plugin features. With beautiful screenshots and videos, the documentation will walk you through the different aspects of WordPress caching.
It’s in your best interest to not use any mobile-specific themes or plugins that show different layouts for mobile and desktop users along with Cache Enabler because then the cache will be bypassed, rendering it useless.
A few highlights of Comet Cache plugin include:
- Fast and efficient cache engine
- Automatic smart cache clearing
- Manual cache clearing
- WP-CLI cache clearing
- Works perfectly with other third party plugins
Price: Free
Get started with Cache Enabler today.
9. Hyper Cache: Yet Another Free WordPress Cache
Hyper Cache is a caching plugin purely written in PHP that can be used in both cheap hosting environments as well as high end servers.
Activating Hyper Cache is easy because it works with a set of default values.
The plugin comes with a mobile theme switch option that allows you to enable caching even if you’re using different layouts for mobile users and desktops. This comes in handy if you use a responsive theme on your site or need different ad formats for different devices.
Another unique benefit of Hyper Cache is its ability to serve cached pages to comment authors. However, you can also disable serving cached pages to comment authors if you want to.
It is also a bbPress ready plugin, so you can enable cache for your bbPress forum pages.
The downside to this plugin is that it hasn’t been updated in a really long time nor has it been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. We would recommend looking for a plugin that is better maintained.
A few highlights of Hyper Cache plugin include:
- Double cache for desktop and mobile site versions
- CDN Support and HTTPs ready
- Serve expired pages to bots to increase perceived speed score
Price: Free
Get started with Hyper Cache today.
10. LiteSpeed Cache: Best All-in-One Site Acceleration Plugin
LiteSpeed Cache is a free plugin for WordPress sites that features an exclusive server-level cache. It has plenty of site optimization features to reduce page load time.
You can import/export your settings from other caching plugins so moving to LiteSpeed Cache is a breeze.
Some of LiteSpeed Cache’s highlights include:
- Image optimization and lazyload
- Multiple CDN support
- PageSpeed score optimization
- Cloudflare API
- Single Site and Multisite (Network) support
Price: Free plugin to speed up your website.
Get started with LiteSpeed Cache today.
11. Autoptimize: Most Compatible Caching Plugin
Autoptimize is a free and awesome WordPress caching plugin that makes speed optimization really easy.
It comes with an extensive API that enables you to tailor the Autoptimize plugin to suit your site’s specific needs.
Autoptimize concatenates all scripts and styles on your site, and minifies and compresses them. It then adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts (optionally) to the footer. It also minifies your website’s HTML code itself which can speed up your WordPress even more.
With Autoptimize caching enabled, your pages load at lightning-fast loading speeds. Here’s what the Autoptimize plugin offers:
- Lazy-load and image optimization
- Flawless compatiblity with most websites
- Pro support for auto configurations
Price: Free
Get started with Autoptimize today.
And there you have it! That’s our list of the best WordPress cache plugins in the market. If you’re still wondering which is the right WordPress cache plugin for your site, we give you our verdict next.
Choosing the Best WordPress Caching Plugin for Your Needs
When it comes to choosing a WordPress caching plugin for your site, there is no “one size fits all” solution.
If you’d like to choose the best free WordPress caching plugin that does the job, then choose either W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Both of them are constantly being updated and are used by over a million websites.
If you need a the best WordPress cache plugin that offers tremendous support and requires minimal configuration on your end, choose WP Rocket. It is also part of our best WordPress plugins.
We hope this guide helped you choose the best caching plugin for your website. Good luck with speeding up your site!
If you also want to grow your organic traffic, take a look at the best WordPress SEO tools and our beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO.
Which one do you think is the best cache plugin which covers all the feature i.e. one in all.
Each plugin has its unique features. You should read our conclusion to understand which software is best for you!
I’m surprised the Litespeed cache plugin isn’t included in this list (aware that not all servers are litespeed but SG Optimizer is in the list, sooo).
While these are very good cache plugins they all have their drawbacks which can make them an undesirable choice. For instance, WP Rocket, consistently regarded as the best has purge rules which simply do not work for busy blogs and e-commerce stores. It will clear the entire cache when a sale comes in, when a comment or review is published, when a post is published and so on. This can lead to fewer cached pages and increased server load. Litespeed has finer control over cache purge rules meaning the entire site performs better.
On top of the purge rules that are far more superior it’s also packed with features that the others simply don’t have. These are lazy load, image optimisation with webp and much more.
I have used most of the plugins in this list and if I can’t use Litespeed I will revert reluctantly to WP Rocket.
The plugin WP Fastest Cache tells you to install the plugin WP-Optimize for part of its recommendations. Aren’t they basically the same plugin, so can’t I delete WP Fastest Cache and just keep WP-Optimize? Thanks!
what about Litespeed cache?
I wonder which one is the best for a multisite?
Thanks for sharing this collection of plugins with us. It’s really awesome article.
Autoptimize loads my site a whole lot faster than WP Rocket. Performance score 99% but using WPR 86%
Does it work with WP Fastest Cache
What are you thoughts about LiteSpeed Cache? My wordpress came with that plugin. Should I change to a different cache plugin?
Looks like it’s a good plugin but I’ve never tried it yet.
You need Litespeed server for it to work 100%
Litespeed Cache plugin is great…especially at no charge there are a ton of options. I have my site using it and it went from 2.4 seconds load speed with 86 PageLoad speed to 1.4 seconds with 99% Pageload speed according to GT Metrix. I recommend it. The only thing I noticed is under the Litespeed Cache–>Settings–>Optimize if you enable CSS Combine, your site fonts get changed with something random like Times New Roman (at least on my site it did), so I chose not to enable Combine CSS. Other than that, I have no complaints about it at all.
YOU WRITE THAT ROCKET CACHE IS 39$ BUT IS 49
Thanks! I just updated the post.
Thankss for this really nice info.
Why you did not mention LiteSpeed Cache Plugin. It’s free and comes with more feature including image optimization.
You should try LSCache for more faster site load.
yes correct but not support every hosting company. they are argue “OpenLite speed and the Apache are 2 different types of webserver. and we not provide OpenLite speed in this plan. however you can upgrade to get this benefit”.
So its hopeless in this current plan.
I am trying to recover from my own issues with multiple sites being hacked, so your post is timely and appreciated.
When I ran the WP Security Scan tool, one of the things that it noted is that an htaccess file did not exist in my wp-admin directory.
I couldn’t find any documentation in the tool to explain what this file should contain though.
Can this contain some basic information, or is it something that should be customized to each site?Any recommendations on this step would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Thank You for your review….
Any cache list that doesn’t include Borlabs Cache and Swift Performance WordPress Cache is highly suspect!
I think there is much better free cache plugins out there, but Swift Performance should be mentioned.
Thanks for stopping by Bryant and Gary.
Agree. Specially for Borlabs
Have you compared them to LiteSpeed’s LSCache? It’s getting pretty popular, especially for WordPress users 🙂
Didn’t test it yet but thanks for the addition, Kacey!
You forgot to mention Autoptimize, a plugin recommended by Google Optimization Experts in many cases.
Yup!
That’s a great addition to the list, Patrik. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Is there any other way to make your website’s loading time faster ? instead of caching it ?
Take a look at this article for speeding up your website.