WordPress Plugins to speed up your website are essential. Lets face it we all want to have a lightning fast website. If our site visitors have to wait for more than just a couple of seconds there is a good chance that they have lost their patience and have moved on to another site… causing you to loose exposure and revenue.
Finding the right WordPress Plugin for website caching can be an especially difficult issue Since wordpress is a completely dynamic content management system (CMS)/blogging platform. Every time a visitor comes to your website, the contents have to be loaded, calculated, computed, digested, and then finally displayed. On some sites this can take an especially long time, and there can be a lot of different factors. If you simply cut out many of the time consuming steps involved with loading and computing, you can display the content in much less time, and your server can handle a much larger load.
The benefits of caching can be increased when we realize that all the plugins that we use to extend our wordpress features each add a small (or large) speed hit to our wordpress site. Each time the site is visited the code for all active plugins are essentially loaded wether they are used or not.
There are pros and cons to caching your web content. Do a google search and you will find some more in depth articles on this topic. Since the topic of this article is the top 3 best wordpress plugins for website caching, lets get to the plugins.
WordPress Plugins for Caching:
WordPress Plugin: Quick Cache (Speed Without Compromise)
Quick Cache is a relatively new guy on the block compared with the other 2 we will discuss today. What it lacks in refinement it makes up for in simplicity. The quick cache interface is very easy to manage overall. With so many different caching options available it can be overwhelming to manage and understand the caching for your site. Quick Cache simplifies the options down to just the most important settings, and offers valuable descriptions/help for each option. It is a good place to start for wordpress administrators that have never worked with caching before.
Pros:
- Easy Interface
- Lots of Useful Help
Cons:
- Missing some valuable caching features
WordPress Plugin: WP Super Cache
Super Cache is the next one in our lineup, as probably the most popular caching plugin listed on wordpress.org. WP Super Cache is a pretty amazing and well supported plugin. It provides many additional features that Quick Cache doesn’t have. The additional features come with additional complexity. Although the plugin is more complex, it also sports some decent helps to allow you to make your way around and start to understand just what you are setting up.
Pros:
- Lots of caching features
- Great support
- Large user base
Cons:
- Difficult to setup
- Significant learning curve for optimal configuration
WordPress Plugin: W3 Total Cache
Our final contestant is my personal favorite. I have worked with both of the above plugins, and they have done a good job overall. Although it doesn’t have the same install base as WP Super Cache, or the more simple interface of Quick Cache, W3 Total Cache has the right combination of features and simplicity to make it do an amazing job without taking two years to configure.
Now that is not saying that it won’t take any time for you to set it up… it will take some time, there are lots of different caching features to work through, but first and foremost is that the end result is a lightning fast website.
Pros:
- The right mix of features and simplicity
- Cache type feature sections, so you can play with the settings in one feature section at a time
- Cache Preview lets you view the resulting cached pages without breaking your website
Cons:
- Takes longer to setup than Quick Cache
All in all caching is a very important element for any website, especially high traffic websites. So do your research, test these plugins out, and make your website lightning fast!
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