Speed is now a major Google Ranking Factor. The faster your blog, the better your ranking and visitors are likely to stay longer. Your best bet right now is to make your blog load at the speed of light.
Have you ever wondered how to make your blog load faster? The good news is that there are plugins that will improve your site performance in Google Pagespeed, Pingdom, Gtmetrix, Sukuri load time and WebpageTest.
Caching Plugins help save copies of your posts and serve them directly to your visitors thereby reduces the load on your Server. This results in faster loading time. Caching plugins can also help reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They also combine HTML, CSS and JS.
The process of reducing the sizes of html, css and JS is called minify. We have HTML Minify, CSS Minify and Javascript minify.
Ensure to test your Page speed after activating caching plugins to know if your pages are loading faster or slower. You may want to click here to see my favourite Page Speed Plugins
The Best WordPress Caching Plugin
When it comes to Caching, there are a whole lot of great Plugins. All you need to do is install one by one to see which works best (Make sure only one caching plugin is active at a time).
For many, W3 Total Cache is the best Caching Plugin. For some Wp Super Cache is the best Plugin for Caching, For others, it is Wp Fastest cache. Since there must be a winner, I go with W3 total cache as the best Caching Plugin. It has the highest features and configuration options.
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.
You may be wondering, how much will it cost me to get W3 Total Cache Plugin and where can I get it? Total Cache is available in the WordPress repository for free.
Just like the Yoast SEO Plugin, if you want more features or wish to use Total Cache for commercial purposes, then you can purchase the Premium Version. The free version is more than okay for you (and that’s what I use).
Key Features of W3 Total Cache Plugin
- You can use it with your current hosting
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) management
- Mobile support
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support (https support)
- Compresses and reduces the size of your pages to make them load faster
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript
- Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN
- Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of fragments in memory or on disk
- Minification of posts and pages and feeds
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
- Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
- JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
- Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
- WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating and more
- Various security features
- Caching statistics for performance insights
- Extension framework for customization or extensibility e.g. New Relic, Cloudflare, WPML and more
- Reverse proxy integration via Nginx or Varnish
Note: Caching means saving your pages so that visitors get it without going to your server directly. This will help to reduce the load on your server.
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Other Great Caching Plugins Are
- Wp Super Cache
- Wp Fastest Cache
- Cache Enabler
- Wp Speed of light
- Comet cache
- Wp speed of light
- Hyper cache
- Wp Rocket
Warning!
Don’t use two or more caching plugins together. They will conflict and crash your blog. Be very careful. However, you can use Caching plugins like Cache enabler, Wp super cache and WP Rocket with Autoptimize Plugin (i.e Autoptimize + Cache Enable, or Autoptimize + Wp super cache, etc). Don’t enable minify in both WordPress and your caching plugin. Choose whether to Minify with Plugin or Cloudflare. Enabling both will kill your blog immediately.
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Conclusion: W3 Total Cache is the best Caching Plugin for WordPress. All you need to do is Install, activate and Configure it Under settings. If you are not okay with total Cache or it conflicts with your theme, then try other great plugins above.
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