5 Best WordPress Cache Plugins Of 2024 (Mostly Free)

Cache PluginKey FeaturesDirect Link
WP Rocket✓ Powerful page and browser caching
✓ GZIP compression
✓ Lazy loading and eCommerce compatible
✓ It’s a premium plugin. (Starts at $59/year)
Download
W3 Total Cache✓ CDN Integration for faster load times
✓ Lazy Loading for improved user experience
✓ Browser caching and enhanced website safety
✓ It’s a free plugin
Download
Hosting Cache✓ Hosting company’s in-built caching
✓ Don’t require 3rd party plugin
✓ Included with the hosting plans (no extra payment)
Learn More
WP Super Cache✓ Page Caching and Cached Files Preloading
✓ Allows integration with CDNs
✓ Garbage collection feature to manage the cache
✓ It’s a free plugin
Download
WP Fastest Cache✓ Page Caching and CSS/Javascript files minification
✓ Enables Gzip compression for cached files
✓ SSL and CDN support
✓ It’s a freemium plugin. (Pro starts at $49/lifetime)
Download
Hyper Cache✓ Supports desktop and mobile caching
✓ SSL support and integration with CDNs
✓ Autoclean to control the cache used disk space
✓ It’s a free plugin
Download
Best WordPress Cache Plugins
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Are you looking for the best cache plugin to speed up WordPress?

Read on…

Internet today is all about speed.

The faster your site and webpage load, the better it is from the point of a user AND the search engine.

There are ways using which you can speed up your website, including using one of the fastest WordPress web hostings, compressing images, using CDN, using caching techniques, and so on.

Here, we will talk about some of the best WordPress cache plugins that you can use on your WordPress powered site and blogs to speed up the loading time.

Even Google made it clear that they take page load time as one of the signals for search engine ranking, and knowing the fact, we can’t ignore the importance of faster loading time of your WordPress-powered or any other platform based websites.

How does WordPress caching plugin help?

Alright, let’s take the hard part first and explain why you need one of these WordPress caching plugins.

Let me explain it in simple terms:

When a reader opens a page on your WordPress site, WordPress queries the database, and it loads everything (sidebar, related post, custom hook) related to that page from your database, which makes numerous calls to your database.

This is a lot of computation that is repeated every time a user opens a webpage on your WordPress site.

What happens when lots of visitors visit at a single time? Your web-hosting has to do a lot of computation in a single second, due to which your server crashes sometimes.

You must have seen errors like 500 internal server error or error connecting database.

These are severe problems, and a lot of users using WordPress are not aware of why that happens. The solution to this problem is using a caching plugin.

Here is how caching in WordPress works:

How caching in WordPress works
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WordPress cache plugin converts your pages into static pages (cache) when a user requests a page for the first time.

Now, when a second user requests the same page, instead of querying the database, the cache plugin serves the pages from the cache which reduces the server load, and your website will load faster.

Especially as a starter, you might be using shared hosting, which offers good resources but again using a caching plugin helps a lot to lower down server load and you might not get an unexpected warning like exceeded CPU limit and so on.

There are many top caching plugins for WordPress available in the WordPress repository.

Some of these are well-known: WP super cache, W3 total cache, WP-Rocket, and many more.

Here in this article, I will talk about some of the best WordPress cache plugins and explain the features so that you can compare them and pick the best one for your WordPress environment.

Do remember, pick only one as almost all of them do the same job. Using more than one cache plugin might lead to conflict, and your server might act funny.

Also, it’s a good idea to contact your web hosting provider and ask them which WordPress cache plugins work best with their hosting configuration. At times, this helps in picking the right cache plugin for your platform.

Recommended reading:

The best WordPress cache plugins:

Before you pick one plugin from this list of best WordPress cache plugins, make sure you take into account your hosting and server configuration.

For example, the W3 total cache plugin works best with VPS or dedicated servers, whereas Super cache is ideal for shared hosting.

I would also be explaining some of the main advantages of these WordPress cache plugins, and you can pick the one which you believe is compatible with your server’s environment.

Before you start using any one of these cache plugins, make sure you run a speed test on your site using Pingdom or GTMetrix and note the loading time.

After installing the cache plugin, rerun a test and notice the difference.

1. WP Rocket (Premium)

WP Rocket
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WP-Rocket is the only premium cache plugin that made to this list.

They have been in the industry for the last 3 years and they are the best choice for premium WordPress websites.

If you are using Kinsta hosting, this is the only cache plugin that they allow. 

With minimum configuration options, WP Rocket has proven to:

  • Improve the loading time of the pages
  • Improves the indexing of page
  • Offers lazy loading of images (Best for image-heavy websites)
  • Superior support for nontechnical WordPress users.
  • Preload mode

You can read a detailed review of WP-rocket here and watch a case study in the below video:

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Starts at only $39 for the single site

2. W3 Total Cache (Free)

W3 Total Cache
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W3 is one of the most advanced WordPress caching plugins which works out of the box and offers an advanced caching mechanism.

However, a perfect W3 total cache configuration might require some technical skills.

The latest version of the W3 total cache offers integration with Cloudflare. You can quickly configure CDN easily using this plugin.

Object caching is one more feature that you should use in this plugin.

Some more notable features of this top WordPress cache plugin are:

  • Page cache
  • Database Caching
  • Minify CSS, JS
  • CDN
  • Cloudflare
  • Works best with VPS and Dedicated hosting but works with Shared hosting too
  • Caching of the search results page

Read: How to configure W3TC plugin

3. Use Hosting In-Built Cache

The majority of managed WordPress hosting companies have in-built caching and they don’t require any 3rd party plugin. The in-built caching system is powerful enough to make your WordPress website load faster.

Kinsta cache:

Kinsta offers an in-house caching system that automatically purges the cache when you update your WordPress website. They are one of the few hostings which offer integration with the WP-Rocket plugin for enhanced caching. This is what we use here at ShoutMeLoud.

SiteGround cache:

A few shared web-hosting services like Bluehost, SiteGround also offers inbuilt caching system.

I’m particularly a fan of SiteGround inbuilt cache plugin called SG Optimizer (which works only on SiteGround hosting).

If you use any of these web hosting services, then is no need for an extra cache plugin.

4. WP Super Cache (Free)

WP Super cache plugin
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WP Super Cache is a very popular plugin and also one of the most recommended WordPress caching plugins.

WP Super Cache is easy to install, easy to use, and also gives you a good performance boost. It generates static HTML files from your dynamic blog this plugin will also provide gzip compression.

Now you can use your subdomain as a CDN in WP Super Cache, for serving static files like Images, Javascript, and CSS from another site or CDN.

If you’re a new user with average needs, this would be the best choice for you. Here is the guide for configuring the Super Cache plugin:

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This is one of the most active and updated plugins and is managed by Automattic.

Depending upon your server config, you can configure the Super Cache plugin to cache files using any of the 3 ways:

Mod_rewrite, PHP & legacy caching.

For faster loading of a WordPress site, I recommend you to configure Apache mod_rewrite way to cache your files.

WP Super Cache has a Preload mode, which is very useful for a site that is not updated very often and you can preload content and set an expiry – a feature that you might not be using.

Once you have configured the Super Cache plugin, make sure you use the feature Test cache under the easy mode, which will confirm whether or not this plugin works fine.

5. WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache
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WP Fastest cache was a new entrant in 2016, and it’s listed here because it’s awesome and very easy to configure. This is a plug and play WordPress cache plugin that you can download and configure in just a few minutes.

6. Hyper Cache

Hyper Cache Plugin
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Hyper Cache is another brilliant caching plugin for WordPress users who host their blogs on low resources hosting providers, for example (CPU and MySQL). The one advantage of Hyper Cache is, that it works even with Windows hosting. Some of the features that Hyper Cache boasts of are listed below:

  • Compatible with the plugin WP-PDA which enables a blog to be accessible from mobile devices
  • Manages (both) plain and gzip compressed pages
  • An auto-clean system to reduce the disk usage
  • 404 caching
  • Redirects caching
  • Last-Modified HTTP header compatibility with 304 responses
  • Compressed storage to reduce the disk space usage
  • Agents, URL’s and cookies based rejection configurable
  • Easy to integrate with other plugins

Conclusion: Which is the best Cache plugin for WordPress?

All these WordPress caching plugins have their own reasons and features to use.

If you are new to the blogging world, I’d recommend you to use the WP Super Cache WordPress Plugin. If you want a more advanced caching system on your blog and only the best, use WP-Rocket. This is what I’m using on ShoutMeLoud.

Though, my best advice for faster loading would work on all aspects of your WordPress site. That includes using CDN from MaxCDN, Compress images using Shortpixels plugin, and using a Powerful hosting server.

There are many more plugins that can be added to this list of WordPress cache plugins, but I would like to keep the list short and pick the best in the market.

I would love to know which cache plugin for WordPress you are using.

Write back in the comment section below.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

28 thoughts on “5 Best WordPress Cache Plugins Of 2024 (Mostly Free)”

  1. Bibit.WS

    how about cache plugin for AMP page?

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