57% of visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load — clearly, website speed is essential to the user experience.
There are several easy ways to speed up your WordPress site, such as optimizing your images, purchasing a CDN service, and the main topic of this article, the best WordPress caching plugin.
Caching helps you speed up your WordPress site and boost performance.
In this guide, we will share the best WordPress caching plugin we found 6 months ago and tested on almost all of our client’s websites, to share the experience with you.
If you want an easy and quick way to optimize the speed of your WordPress website, data caching is one of the first things to check. First, let’s define what caching is and why it’s essential.
What is caching?
Caching is the process of saving and storing static copies of your site’s files in a temporary storage location. Doing this allows a web page to be delivered to the visitor’s browser more quickly.
To fully understand the benefits of caching, let’s review what happens when a visitor sees your website for the first time.
When a user visits a page on your site, their browser sends a request to your website’s hosting server asking for the different elements of your site — including HTML files, CSS style sheets, JavaScript, images, and more. Your server then builds these resources and sends them back to the user’s browser, resulting in a web page being shown on their screen.
If your website uses caching, some information from your site’s web pages will be stored locally on the user’s device. The next time a user visits a page on your website, some of that information is fetched from their computer’s local storage instead of your web server. As you can guess, getting data from a cache is faster than retrieving it from a distant web server.
Additionally, by caching your website, your server uses fewer resources to load a web page, which in turn reduces Time to First Byte (TTFB). TTFB is the amount of time between the browser sending a request to the server and receiving its first byte of data. This will improve your overall website performance.
Why is Caching Important?
Caching is important because it reduces the load on your WordPress hosting servers and makes your website run faster. A faster website improves user experience and encourages users to visit more pages. This also helps you boost engagement and the time users spend on your website.
A faster website helps you drive even more traffic to your website from organic search. Google gives a significant SEO advantage to faster websites which helps you rank higher in search results.
How do you set up caching in WordPress?
While many websites use caching to improve performance, the WordPress CMS doesn’t include caching functionality in its core feature set.
Your hosting provider may include caching services for your site (in which case you may not be allowed to install some or any caching plugins). If not, you can turn on caching yourself.
A good hosting provider which we also use is SiteGround which has included caching services and a special WordPress Caching Plugin developed from them in all WordPress Hosting Plans.
Another Hosting Provider, considered by some the best WordPress Hosting Provider is Blue Host.
All their plans also include caching services. You could check all their Hosting Plans here.
If you don’t have an included caching service, the easier alternative is to use a WordPress plugin.
Let’s check out The Best WordPress caching plugin available in 2022.
The Best WordPress Caching Plugin in 2023 – NitroPack
NitroPack is a cloud-based performance optimization tool that helps you optimize your website performance.
Specifically, the best WordPress caching plugin will help you get 100/100 Google Pagespeed Scores and fix all of your Core Web Vital issues in a couple of clicks.
It integrates with WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, Opencart and other platforms.
Once you sign up, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up and starts delivering instant results from its CDN platform which includes
- Complete image optimization stack
- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript optimization
- Critical CSS, DNS prefetching & preloading
…and much more!
I decided to put NitroPack to the test on this blog.
We collected a bunch of data from WebPageTest and Google Pagespeed Insights, then we installed NitroPack and ran the same tests again.
We found that our score increased dramatically…
In terms of ease of use and results, NitroPack is the best WordPress caching plugin and site speed optimization tool I’ve used in the last decade.
So let me break down its best features for you…
What Do I Get For My Money?
I’m going to show you all the different features of NitroPack below, or you can just watch this short video:
Easy Setup & Installation
Setting up NitroPack is really simple.
First, you need to create an account:
- Go to NitroPack
- Select your plan (they have a free plan)
- Enter your details
- Accept the terms & conditions
And that’s it.
After that, you need to connect your site to NitroPack.
To do so you need to download and install the relevant connector (an SEO plugin for WordPress). Once NitroPack is installed, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:
Then all you have to do is:
- Log into your account
- Go to Dashboard > Connect Your Website
- Copy Your Site ID & Site Secret to your connector
- Click on Connect
And that’s it!
HTML Optimization
It’s very easy for your HTML code to become unnecessarily bloated and not necessarily optimized in the right way.
NitroPack has a number of features that will automatically make your code faster and lighter such as HTML modification:
Along with HTML compression to deliver & load your site quickly to your visitors no matter how bad their connection is.
Plus, it automatically optimizes any necessary “DNS pre connects” to help reduce load time and speed up connections to required sources.
CSS Optimization
Like HTML, it’s easy for CSS files to become bloated which lots of styles that aren’t used on the current page you are viewing.
NitroPack – the WordPress caching plugin has built a number of features specific to optimizing CSS-
- CSS Combining – They automatically combine your CSS files into 1 perfectly optimized file
- Above The Fold CSS – To make sure your site renders as quickly as possible, they extract and load the CSS needed above the fold first
- Minification – The optimized CSS code is then minified to reduce the file size
- Compression – Which is then compressed to deliver it quickly
All of this is done alongside the deferred loading of Google Fonts which means your site and content get loaded rapidly.
To put it simply NitroPack will reduce load time and reduce first content paint times with its unique approach to CSS optimization.
JavaScript Optimization
JavaScript is public enemy number 1 for optimizing your site speed.
These include things like JQuery or tracking scripts like Google Analytics or Facebook pixels alongside any Javascript functionality baked into your site.
This is why NitroPack WordPress Caching Plugin has built a number of Javascript optimization-specific features that allow your site to load faster without any loss of function-
- JS Combining – Combining Javascript files usually creates problems but NitroPack’s intelligent solution works out of the box
- JS Minification – All Javascript code is automatically minified without breaking anything
- JS Compression – This is then all compressed to deliver it as quickly as possible
- Deferred Loading – And automatically defers the loading of scripts that can wait, while giving priority to the most important scripts
What I love about NitroPack’s WordPress Caching Plugin approach is that it just works out of the box with a number of popular scripts.
This isn’t usually the case with optimization plugins and I’ve been very impressed with NitroPack’s ability to overcome Javascript problems.
Image Optimization
Images also provide a huge amount of opportunity to add unnecessary bloat to a page.
Usually having unoptimized images in the first place or serving images that are larger than they need to be for the device that is viewing your site leads to:
- Increased loading times
- Increased page sizes
- Decreased page speed scores
NitroPack WordPress Caching Plugin takes care of image optimization automatically by:
- Adaptive image sizing: It automatically loads the perfectly sized image, every time.
- Image compression: All images are compressed with lossy or lossless compression algorithms which retain all quality
- WEBP Support: Automatically load optimized WEBP files where the browser supports them
- Advanced lazy loading: Defer the loading of your images until your visitors need to see them.
This means that no matter the device or browser, you will always be loading the most optimized version of the image automatically.
Robust Content Delivery Network
NitroPack includes a robust CDN which means all of your HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images will all be served locally to your visitor.
So if your visitor comes from Germany, everything loads from a German data center. If they come from the UK, everything loads from a UK data center and so forth.
The NitroPack CDN also includes some additional features:
- GZIP & Brotli Compression: modern compression formats for quick data delivery.
- Global CDN: This helps deliver your website quickly everywhere in the world. No matter where your visitor is.
- HTTP/2 Compatibility: This optimizes your site for fast delivery over HTTP/2.
Advanced WordPress Caching Plugin System
All of this is built on top of NitroPack’s advanced caching system which includes a number of features to make caching more intelligent:
Smart Invalidation
This ensures that optimized content is always served to your visitors while your new content is being updated in the background by the WordPress Caching Plugin.
Cookie & Device Awareness
A lot of sites use cookies to deliver optimized and personalized content based on your customer’s data like:
- Currency
- Language
- Device
- Country
NitroPack is able to recognize this and generate optimized pages for each device and visitor as needed on the fly.
For example, your site might look different on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a mobile phone – NitroPack WordPress Caching Plugin will create unique caches for each of those devices to make sure it’s always delivering the most optimized experience possible.
3rd-party Cache Integration
NitroPack is compatible with 3rd party caching software such as:
- Vanish
- Sucuri
- NGINX cache
- Cloudflare
- Cloudways cache
And much more!
Speed up your site.
A cache plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to boost site performance and increase user satisfaction. You can use any of the hosting providers above to create a fast website that delights your visitors or just install NitroPack — without touching any code in your theme or .htaccess files.
To Do so you could use Our Special Coupon Code for 5% Discount on Nitropack.io – GROWKAL
