Caching is one of the most important ways to improve the load time of your website. Users are likely to bounce from a website that takes too long to load.
With WordPress now being commonly used by a large number of businesses and individuals for developing a website, this content management system has included a number of plugins for caching.
Before proceeding to take a look at some of the fastest WordPress cache plugins for 2018, let us first understand the terms plugin and caching.
Plugins are essentially small portions of software that are used to add new functions and features to a website created using WordPress.
Caching is a process in which any information that is frequently or recently accessed by a user is stored on their local hard drive. The advantage is that each time a user tries to access this information, the browser simply has to access the cache for the information instead of having to retrieve it all over again. This results in a faster page load time.
Now that you know what is caching and plugins, let us take a look at some of the best WordPress cache plugins for cache this year.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is quite the user-friendly cache plugin and is a blessing for those who find the intricacies of web programming quite perplexing. There is no need to configure the plugin. It will start working as soon as you activate it. For those who are better off tech-wise than others, there is an advanced settings option in which you can opt for a custom configuration.
The plugin features the lazy image loading, which means that an image is loaded only when the user scrolls down the webpage to it. This is a crucial aspect of improving the page load speed.
W3 Total Cache
This is one of the most popular plugins with over a million ratings. The plugin features are updated regularly and are used by a large number of important publications. Using the W3 plugin has been found to improve the speed by 29.6 percent with an average of 1.06 seconds reduction in the loading time.
The baseline loading time was reduced by 0.62 seconds and showed an improvement of 20.64 percent on an average when it came to page load speed.
WP Fastest Cache
Again, among the top three of the fastest WordPress cache plugins for 2018, WP Fastest Cache, supports SSL and CDN. In addition to this, you can block the cache for certain web pages and also allows you to disable and enable the mobile support. The WP Fastest Cache is quite user-friendly and it uses Mod_Rewrite that allows the user to manage the cache the way they want to. The plugin allows the admin to delete unwanted cache files by simply visiting the options page.
Hyper Cache
Again, for those of you who are not quite comfortable with the nitty-gritty of configuring a plugin, good news, this particular plugin does not require any complex configuration. Both mobile users and desktop users have separate caches which increase the efficiency of the website even when all users are actively participating or commenting on the website. Usually, in such cases, other cache plugins have a tendency to collapse.
Comet Cache
The Comet Cache is intuitive in nature. It takes snapshots of every activity on your webpage in real time and then caches them appropriately. The Comet Cache is quite effective, yet quite simple. You can control the automatic cache clearing behavior on this plugin in addition to being able to set an automatic expiration time for your cache files. You can also ignore any caches that come with query strings.