Choosing a WordPress caching plugin: benchmarking 18 plugins

When developing our own website, we always want to reduce load time to a minimum, and many have done it almost like a sport, trying to gain at least 1/10 of a second. We all know how important caching is, but there are many ways to fool ourselves by looking at load times alone. For the test, we tried to find several different caching plugins and test their performance.

A quick note about caching

Google recently announced that all mobile-friendly sites (and speed is the way to be “friendly”) are getting a significant SERP starting on April 21st. You may have already seen the “mobile friendly” tag in search results. And in Google Page Insights, the very first panel is adapted for mobile devices, and not for desktops. Google’s intent is clear, and it sounds loud to any SEO or webmaster. Now it is important to work on the performance of both the desktop and mobile versions of the site, which we tried to display in benchmarking.

There are several ways to improve website performance and speed up loading times, but for most webmasters using a caching plugin is not only one of the easiest, but also the only way to get the most out of it.

WordPress (and most CMS sites) dynamically renders pages on the fly, which requires multiple hits to the database to retrieve different pieces of content. Caching these dynamically rendered pages allows the user to see regular HTML pages. This significantly reduces load times and relieves the server load.

Plugins tested:

• AIO Cache
• Alpha Cache
• Bodi0’s Easy Cache
• Cachify
• Flexicache
• Gator Cache
• Hyper Cache
• Hyper Cache Extended
• Lite Cache
• Next Level Cache
• Really Static
• Super Static Cache
• W3 Total Cache
• Wordfence Falcon
• WP Fast Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• WP Rocket
• WP Super Cache
• WP-Cache.Com
• Zen Cache (formerly Quick Cache)

Output

All plugins presented here have different functionality. Some are very simple, while others can be compared to a Swiss knife. Super Cache, W3 and other plugins are often used by pros who are familiar with CDNs and other tricks. Other users prefer to work with simpler plugins like Lite Cache and WP-Cache.com. By the way, WP-Cache.com, as mentioned above, is a little-known plugin that has shown excellent results.

Who is the winner?

In first place is WP-Rocket, a paid plugin that a whole team of specialists is working on. For installation, developers ask $ 39, and for unlimited – $ 199.

In second place is WP Super Cache. Here the results are almost the same as those of the leader.

In third place is WP-cache.com, an honored prize winner. It looks like there were just as capable developers working on this plugin as on WP-Rocket. This plugin is very easy to configure, so if you don’t want to bother with configuration, we recommend it.