Best Free WordPress Caching Plugins

Best Free Caching Plugins 2020

Being a WordPress user you are already enjoying the powerful features of WordPress Content Management System. As your website becomes older day by day or you increase content on your website, you will feel that your website is getting slower.

And in this fast internet World, Slow speed website surely not acceptable. If your website is slow it makes a negative impact on your daily users and popular search engines also track this as a record which plays a very important role on your website search engine ranking.

In simple words, It is very important that your website visitors see a fast running website.

I have a WordPress website and still wondering how to make it run faster?

What should I do to make it faster?

Is there any simple solution to make my website faster?

I don’t wanna take any developer help to make my website faster. Can I do this myself?

I don’t want to buy any paid software or plugin to make my website faster. Is this possible?

I am glad to share with you that we your every above question solution here.
Slow WordPress website is a common issue which most of the WordPress users face after a certain time period. The common reasons for a slow WP website are:

• Pages content size
• Big size Image on pages
• html/css/javascript/jquery code are not optimized
• WordPress version not updated to latest version
• Theme and plugin files are not updated to latest version
• Use of old php version
• Some virus or malware code on your website.

First of all we need to understand that we should keep our website updated to the lastest version of WordPress version, latest php software version for its security purpose and it will help our website to run smoother as well.

Another important part is we should need to use the latest version of theme files and plugins, it is also very important part of WordPress Security audit and plays a very important role in your website speed as well.

Now, the real part comes.

The simple and single solution for your all the above questions is to use WordPress Cache plugins. WordPress cache plugins will boot your website speed and will take to to another level.

Few important tasks performed by cache plugins are:

• Optimize the css code on your website
• Optimize the script coding (javascript/jquery) for your website
• Optimize the images ( Image compression)
• Code compression
• Use of CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Many more…

How WordPress Cache Plugin works?

First we need to understand that how a WordPress website works. Once a user visit a WordPress website how it works. Let me explain you in simple way and step by step as well.

1. First a user open your website your url on browser.
2. This browser sends a request to your website server to fetch you website content. It means you send a request to your website server so that you can see website content.
3. Your website server receives your request and processes it. Services looks for the content on your website database and send your data on your browser in simple web page format.

It process works every time, when you open a page of your website or post of your website or open any image etc.

Now, you understand that every WordPress website works on client/server architecture. Once your website visitor’s increases the number of request to server also increases and it impact the speed of your website as well.

To reduce the number of request and reduce the server load WordPress Cache plugins are very effective. WordPress cache plugins instructs the server to copy of copy of most commonly used pages/posts  files into the disk or RAM (These are called cache files). In this way, if the same page/post or file request comes from the same user or another user Server can use those files from the Disk/RAM (Cache).  (No need to process the same request again and again).  This reduce the server load and same request page/files load faster from the cache files. In simple words, WordPress cache plugins reduce the work required to generate a page view.

Apart from this important task, cache plugins also optimize your website code, use compression technique to optimize your website images and other coding.

Important benefits of using WordPress Cache Plugins

1. Website Speed Improvements: Caching plugins are very helpful to improve your website speed. It makes a copy of your most frequently used files/pages/post on RAM/Disk/Server as Cache files and these files used to open the same page faster if any user open the same page again.
2. Reduce Server Loads: Caching helps server to reduce loads. Every time any visitor visit your website as request goes to server and server checks for the same request on cache files first and process it from there if available. It helps server  to reduce their work, as server don’t have to process the same request again.
3. Boost in search engine results: If your website loads faster, it makes a positive impact on search engines and they give it priority of your competitor’s website. It helps to improve your website ranking.
4. Lower TTFB:  It stands for Time To First Byte. In simple words, it is the time which your browser require to take the first by from the server. So, if TTFB is low, it means your website is loading faster (getting content faster from server)
5. Compression: Most of the WordPres Caching plugin use compression technique to reduce the size of your website files (css/html/javascript/jquery) so that they can load faster on your website and allow your website to load faster.

WP CACHING PLUGINS

In this article, we will discuss very very popular FREE WordPress Caching plugins. Most of the WP users are using these plugins in their website and with their reviews and feedback on different sources; we are listing these plugin on this article. Our primary motive is to provide your best possible solution at free of cost.

1. LiteSpeed Cache
2. WP Total Cache
3. WP Super Cache
4. WP Fastest Cache
5. Autoptimize
6. WP-Optimize

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP)

LSCWP plugins is very easy and simple plugin to use which has almost everything you need for your website in FREE.

LiteSpeed Cache plugin is all in one solution to improve your website performance. This plugin has more than 900,000 active installations and more than 1k five user ratings on WordPress.org plugin directory.

Like the other caching plugins, this plugin also work on server level caching techniques. It creates a caching files of your website pages/posts so that for every request by visitors, server can fetch you results from these cache files for faster results.

Key Features of Litespeed Cache plugin

• Image Optimization (Lossless/ Lossy)
• Minify CSS, Javascript, and HTML
• Combine CSS/JS
• Automatically generate Critical CSS
• Lazyload images/iframes
• Responsive Image Placeholders
• Multiple CDN support
• Load CSS/JS Asynchronously
• Browser Cache
• Database Cleaner and Optimizer
• PageSpeed score optimization
• OPcode Cache
• HTTP/2 Push for CSS/JS (on web servers that support it)
• DNS Prefetch
• Cloudflare API
• Single Site and Multi Site (Network) support
• Import/Export settings
• Basic/Advanced setting view
• Attractive, easy-to-understand interface
• WebP image format support
• Heartbeat control
• Automatic page caching to greatly improve site performance
• Automatic purge of related pages based on certain events
• Private cache for logged-in users
• Caching of WordPress REST API calls
• Separate caching of desktop and mobile views
• Ability to schedule purge for specified URLs
• WooCommerce and bbPress support

W3 Total Cache

W3TC (W3 Total Cache) plugin the the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of website user, publishers, developers and web hosts from a very long time. It is all in one solution for your website optimization.

W3 Total Cache improve your website SEO and user experiences by increasing the website performance and reducing the load time by its awesome features like: CDN (content delivery network) and latest other techniques.

W3TC plugin saves up to 80% bandwidth when you minify html, minify css and minify js files form the settings. It improves your web server performance and allow your website to load faster. W3TC plugin uses Optimized Progression Render (OPR) technique to start rending quickly and interact very quickly. It is very helpful in conversation rates improvements and site performance improvements.

Key features of W3TC plugin

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
• Transparent content delivery network (CDN) management with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
• Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
• Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
• 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
• Caching methods include local Disk, Redis, Memcached, APC, APCu, eAccelerator, XCache, and WinCache
• Minify CSS, Minify JavaScript and Minify HTML with granular control
• Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
• Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript with automated updates to assets
• Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS with automated updates to assets
• Defer non critical CSS and Javascript for rendering pages faster than ever before
• Defer offscreen images using Lazy Load to improve the user experience
• 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)
• Leverage our multiple CDN integrations to optimize images
• WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating and more
• Various security features to help ensure website safety

WP Super Cache

WP Super cache plugin is another very popular plugin which has more than 2 million active installations. These figures can explain itself this plugin popularity among the WordPress website users.

This plugins generates the static Html files from your website dynamic pages/posts and once a static page is generated, it is used for all future requests by the website visitors. It allow your web server to complete you’re website visitors request from these cache files instead to processing and generating these pages from database.

Its reduce the server loads and also increase the page load speed as more than 99% users will use these cache files to view your website.

This plugin serves cache files in 3 ways:

1. Expert: This method uses the fastest cache technique. This method use Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “supercached” static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are “lighter”. This does require the Apache mod_rewrite module (which is probably installed if you have custom permalinks) and a modification of your .htaccess file which is risky and may take down your site if modified incorrectly.
2. Simple: This method use Supercached static files can be served by PHP and this is the recommended way of using the plugin. The plugin will serve a “supercached” file if it exists and it’s almost as fast as the mod_rewrite method. It’s easier to configure as the .htaccess file doesn’t need to be changed. You still need a custom permalink. You can keep portions of your page dynamic in this caching mode.
3. WP-Cache caching:  This method mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if supercaching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too.

Key Features of WP super cache

• Simple and effective caching techniques used by plugin and easy to setup
• Compress pages/post for faster loading
• Cache rebuild
• CDN Support
• Don’t cache pages for known or logged-in users.
• Preloading process creates automatic caching for your all website automatically
• Admin can delete cache files anytime
• All old cache files go to Garbage collection and admin can clean it anytime.
• IF you edit or modify any page/post, a new cache files created for that page
• Optimize your website css/js code for your website faster loading

WP Fastest Cache

This plugin is very simple to setup and very easy to use as well. You just need to download this plugin and active. It will handle most of the complex part itself. To setup this plugin, you don’t need to modify any .htaccess file it will be modified automatically.

WP fastest cache plugins has more than 1 million active installations and 2880 five star rating on WordPress.org plugin directory which explains its trust level between WordPress users.

WP fastest cache plugin creates static html files for your website pages/post pages etc. and saves them on server. Once any user visits the same page or post page they reach to these static files and hence it reduces the server load and page loads in a very fast way.

Key Features of WP fastest cache

• Create the all website pages/post cache automatically
• Enable/disable cache for mobile devices
• Enable/disable cache for logged-in users
• Cache Timeout –  All cache files are deleted after a set time period
• Cache timeout for some specific pages
• Block cache for any specific page/post using some shortcode
• Admin can delete cache files
• Admin can delete minified css and js files
• All cache files are deleted when a page/post of published
• Mod_Rewrite which is the fastest method is used in this plugin
• SSL/ CDN/ Cloudflare support

Few other popular free caching plugins

WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache.

Autoptimize

Conclusion – Our final words

To run your WordPress website smoothly, provide best user interface to your website visitors, increasing search engine ranking are very important to your website performance (load time/ Speed) plays a very important role on this.

Hence, it is very important to keep your website as fast as possible; it makes a very positive impact on your website visitors and popular search engines as well. WordPress caching plugins are most widely used tool for purpose and can help you to improve your website performance for sure. All the above listed Free WordPress Cache Plugins are very popular among of various WordPress professionals, developers and normal website user as well.
You can use any of them as per your understanding and can take your WP to a next level.

Hope you like our article; you can drop your comments for any suggestions!