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While browsing the internet you must have come across several websites that check your patience with its slow loading pace. Leaving those websites instantly would be your immediate course of action. But you can’t let it happen to your own website, can you?
Caching is one of the best ways to increase the speed of your website. You can enable caching by adding a caching plugin on your website. Here are a few suggestions for the best caching plugins out there.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a great caching plugin for enabling faster loading of your WordPress website. This plugin starts working upon its activation itself. Thus you don’t need to go through a lot of configuration options to put this plugin to work.
Page caching carried out by this plugin provides your website with faster loading time which improves your search engine optimization multiple times thereby leading to a higher conversion rate. It enables faster loading time for your website by employing a number of techniques. Static file compression and images on request are two of them.
Using static file compression WP Rocket reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and these lighter files will help a lot in reducing the loading time of your website. Loading images only on request also reduce loading time to a great extent. Major social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, etc., use this technique to improve their loading time.
W3Total Cache
This free plugin is one of the most popular ones with more than 1 million active installations. For reducing the loading time of your website the plugin makes use of content delivery networks and some other great techniques within it. Thus by adding this plugin to your WordPress website, you will be able to ensure at least 10 times improvement on your site’s performance.
The plugin comes with a bundle of excellent features. Content delivery network (CDN) integration is an important one among them. Whether your website is part of a shared hosting network or a dedicated server, the plugin performs very well in reducing its loading time. AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) support and SSL ( Secure socket layer) support are two great features offered by this plugin.
WP Super Cache
With more than two million active installations WP Supercache is the most popular free plugin available for WordPress. This plugin reduces your website’s loading time by simply generating static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress website. Thus once an HTML file is generated the plugin will be serving that file instead of processing the heavy WordPress PHP scripts when search requests are made.
This plugin serves cached files in three different ways of varying speed. The fastest mode is called expert which is carried out by making changes to the .htaccess file. Using this way can be risky as your whole site could go down if you made errors while modifying it.
The next method is called Simple as it doesn’t involve much risk and an average user can carry it out with ease. Hence it is the recommended way of using this plugin. The third-way WP-Cache caching is mainly for the purpose of caching pages for known users.
Cache Enabler
Cache enabler also works by creating static HTML files and storing them on the server’s disk. Then for every search request made the plugin will serve the static HTML file thereby reducing the loading time to a great extent. This plugin is easy to set up and provides you with a lot more features.
The plugin creates two cached files one plain HTML and the other one gzipped version. These static files are then used to deliver content to your users thereby ensuring faster loading time of your website’s pages.
Comet Cache
Comet Cache makes your website super fast by taking a real-time snapshot of every Page, Post, Category, Link, etc. Then these snapshots are cached thereby making it easy to retrieve them later. This saves a lot of your processing time thus making your site’s loading time faster.
The plugin comes with a clean and easy configuration set up and provides options to control the automatic cache clearing behavior for Home and Posts Page, Author Page, Category, Tag, and Custom Term Archives, Custom Post Type Archives, RSS/RDF/ATOM Feeds, and XML Sitemaps.
URI exclusion patterns, User-agent exclusion patterns, the feature to set an automatic expiration time for cache files, client-side caching, caching for 404 requests and WP-CLI compatibility, etc., are some excellent features offered by this plugin. Its pro version allows you to cache logged-in users, lets you disable dashboard notifications, and much more.
Conclusion
The first and foremost rule of search engine optimization is faster loading websites. You will not achieve better search engine ranking with a slow loading website. Thus employing a caching plugin that helps increase your website’s speed would be a great move to ensure a good ranking. I hope this article helped you make your choice easily.
