Want to speed up your WordPress website? While a great web hosting provider does make a difference, sometimes you need extra help in optimizing your site speed and performance. That’s why you should consider using a caching plugin. In this article, I’ll go through 5 of the Best WordPress Caching Plugins you can use to make your website run faster.
Best WordPress Caching Plugins 2024
| Plugin | Performance | LCP | Fully Loaded Time |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
100% | 719 ms | 873 ms |
 |
99% | 805 ms | 1.3 sec |
 |
98% | 963 ms | 1.5 sec |
 |
97% | 1.0 sec | 1.5 sec |
 |
85% | 1.8 sec | 2.2 sec |
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Why Use a Caching Plugin?
Using a WordPress caching plugin can help improve the speed of your website in a number of ways. When you use a WordPress caching plugin, the content of your website can be “cached” or saved in local memory so you don’t need to go through multiple retrievals from your web server. Your web pages can also be compressed on your server and decompressed in your browser for faster access. Some plugins will create a static html file from your dynamic WordPress content for faster processing.
The right WordPress caching plugin can also help improve your website’s core web vitals—metrics that Google monitors and arguably could have an effect on your search engine rankings.
Top 5 WordPress Caching Plugins
I consider these five caching plugins to be the top choices for WordPress websites. I have used and thoroughly tested all of them. Here are my results.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is quite simply the best WordPress caching plugin that I’ve ever used. In fact, we use it on our website here. WP Rocket is very easy to install. It works great out of the box. And, with just a couple of tweaks, our results have been amazing!
WP Rocket is available in a single website, 3 website, and unlimited website plugin plans. Cost currently runs from $59 per year for a single site to $299 per year for the unlimited website plan. Although there is no free plan option, in my opinion the cost is well worth the improved website speed and performance you get after installing this plugin. And, you can try out WP Rocket risk free for 14 days and get a full refund.
As I mentioned, WP Rocket is easy to install and I had no problems during the installation or activation process. While there was definitely improvement in our website speed and performance, after I enabled the css and javascript minify options, we got even faster results.
You can read my full WP Rocket Review here. WP Rocket continues to deliver outstanding results for us. Overall, it’s our top choice for a WordPress caching plugin.
WP Rocket Speed Test Results
WP Rocket delivered the best results for website speed and performance. In our testing via GTmetrix, WP Rocket consistently posted the best data for both website page loading and core web vitals. WP Rocket is outstanding across the board.
WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache may not be as well-known as the other plugins here, but it does deliver good results. It’s available in both a free and paid version. Although WP Fastest Cache wasn’t the easiest to configure and set up, it wasn’t that difficult.
WP Fastest Cache Speed Test Results
Our speed and performance results using WP Fastest Cache were pretty good—a little better than WP Super Cache, but not as good as WP Rocket.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Like W3 Total Cache, it continues to be one of the more popular caching plugins. WP Super Cache is free to use, and for that reason remains a favorite among newbies.
One of the best things about WP Super Cache is that it continues to be one of the easier WordPress caching plugins to install and setup. There really isn’t much configuration needed out of the box.
WP Super Cache Speed Test Results
In our speed and performance testing, although WP Super Cache didn’t post the best results, they were not bad—on both the page loading and core web vitals sides.
LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache by LiteSpeed Technologies is another well-known WordPress caching plugin. Like WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache is open source and free to use. Although it can be used with any web server, some features do require you to be using a LiteSpeed server. That may or may not be the reason that our results using LiteSpeed Cache were not very impressive.
On the plus side, LiteSpeed Cache may be the easiest caching plugin to set up as it comes with several presets or configurations that you can select.
LiteSpeed Cache Speed Test Results
However, we weren’t as impressed with our speed and performance test results. For that reason, if you’re not using a LiteSpeed server, then I would not recommend LiteSpeed for your WordPress website caching.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is now owned by BoldGrid and continues to be one of the more popular WordPress caching plugins. While I’ve used W3 Total Cache on some of my other websites, it doesn’t seem to do as well on larger sites—at least not lately. W3 Total Cache is available in both a free and paid version. The paid version is definitely on the higher cost side starting at $99 per year.
W3 Total Cache provides a lot of settings options, however for that reason it’s often one of the more difficult caching plugins to configure properly for your website.
W3 Total Cache Speed Test Results
Our speed test results via GTmetrix were a bit disappointing both on the page loading and CWV numbers.
WordPress Caching Plugin Test Results
I tested each of these caching plugins directly on our website. As you can see from our sample test data results from GTmetrix, WP Rocket posted the best results with the fastest times for fully loaded page times and core web vitals including First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to Interactive (TTI), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). WP Rocket was also the only caching plugin to post a 100% performance score.
WP Rocket Speed Data
WP Rocket provides outstanding speed and performance with great core web vital scores. WP Rocket gave us the best results for First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, Largest Contentful Paint, and Time to Interactive
WP Fastest Cache Speed Data
WP Fastest Cache posted very good scores for speed and performance. Core web vitals were also good, however, there was some slight Total Blocking Time.
WP Super Cache Speed Data
WP Super Cache posted good scores for speed and performance. Core web vitals were good, but Time to Interactive was slightly higher.
LiteSpeed Cache Speed Data
LiteSpeed Cache posted fairly good scores for performance. However, core web vitals were not quite as good with First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive a bit higher.
W3 Total Cache Speed Data
W3 Total Cache posted somewhat disappointing scores for performance and speed. Core web vitals were also not good with First Contentful Paint high and the other CWVs (Speed Index, LCP, and TTI) also on the higher side.
Recommendation – Here’s Our Winner!
While using a caching plugin is vital for improving the speed and performance of your WordPress websites, there can be a huge difference in results depending on which plugin you choose to use. In my testing and personal experience using all of the above plugins for WordPress, WP Rocket is the clear winner. It’s a definite must for all critical WordPress websites!
WP Rocket improved our website speed and core web vitals right out of the box. And, with just a couple of tweaks, our speed and CWV results were even better. While you do have to pay for this plugin, in my opinion it is well worth the price to get the performance boost of WP Rocket.
If you’re just starting out, you may want to see how WP Super Cache or WP Fastest Cache works with your website. However, you can also try out WP Rocket free for 14 days with their money back guarantee. I’m confident after seeing the improvement you get with WP Rocket, you’ll agree that it’s worth the investment.
