The best cache plugins to speed up your WordPress sites and where I would use them!
The plugins are listed in order of what I would recommend for most people to try from first to last. In my own personal use case, I love LiteSpeed Cache the most for my high traffic sites (best performance, features, reliability) and then use Swift Performance Lite or WP Performance for smaller sites. Swift Pro and WP Rocket are nice for clients (and bigger sites) who can pay and need something better than a free plugin.
1. WP Performance (FREE)
- If you don’t know what you’re doing, start here.
- Very easy to use.
- Safe to play with caching and won’t break your site. Please don’t try to enable every feature.
- Works well for all types of sites.
- Recommended settings (coming soon)
2. Swift Performance (FREE & PAID)
- FREE free is the best free cache plugin out there (along with LiteSpeed Cache).
- Tons of features, a bit complicated for newbies and risky since they enable stuff that break or slow down their site.
- PAID version has even more incredible features. Works great.
- I recommend Swift free for sites below 400 pages and/or fewer than 10k hits/month. Above that, you should use the pro version.
- Swift Pro is especially great for sites with many pages but little traffic (thanks to its aggressive preload function).
- Swift does sometimes have the annoying white page issue. If you can’t resolve it, you’ll have to switch to another cache plugin.
- Recommended settings
3. LiteSpeed Cache (FREE)
- Honestly the best cache plugin out there. Tons of feature, enterprise-grade performance and reliability. (It’s my favorite.)
- Only drawback is you need LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server to use its caching features.
- Best for sites with many pages and high traffic. I don’t recommend for sites with little traffic (below 10K hits/month). Small sites are better with WPP or Swift since they can precache.
- Recommended settings
4. WP Rocket (PAID)
- Simple to use and great documentation. Still good amount of features, and very reliable.
- If Swift (FREE) and WP Performance doesn’t work for you and you’re not on LiteSpeed servers, WP Rocket is a solid choice.
- WP Rocket is good for all sites.
- Only reason why some people don’t like WP Rocket is cost or lack of granular features. Depending on the user, it’s ease-of-use can be a pro or a con.
- Recommended settings
5. FlyingPress (PAID)
- Quality cache plugin built by a passionate speed specialist.
- Very simple and easy to use yet has advanced/unique functions not found in other cache plugins.
- Still maturing and might still have some bugs but I think they’re already being worked out as this is written.
Great review as always Johnny!…. Hey, you wrote, “I recommend Swift free for sites below 400 pages and/or fewer than 10k hits/month. Above that, you should use the pro version.”
To you, what’s the significance of 400 pages?
PS. I’ve got a lifetime pro subscription and Swift has been my go-to for years. Love them and their support – and your continued guidance. 😉
I think 400 pages is the sweet spot for where you need a faster pre-caching mechanism or else your site takes too long to precache (especially on weak shared-hosting servers). The Swift Pro has the much faster COMPUTE-API preloading mechanism and the difference is noticeable. Depending on how heavy your site is, the difference can be minutes instead of hours.
You said that you wouldn’t recommend LiteSpeed on sites with little traffic because the other have precache, but there are options to precache with LS.
You could use the LS crawler or Optimus Cache Prime or similar script. I know they aren’t the simplest options but they are not massively complex either.
Yes, indeed. Although a few things… LS crawler is not very aggressive. And OCP is great but I feel like it’s too technical for many users to set up. I believe another developer (I think his name was “Jaro”) said he was going to release a cache prewarmer plugin soon.
I haven’t used the LS crawler much, it seems that it’s a bit of an omission that there is no control over the level of ‘aggressiveness’.
Really interested in checking out any new options, had a quick search for “Jaro cache warmer” and couldn’t find anything, if you have any more info about it then I’d like to take a look.
You can control its ‘aggressiveness’ from the Crawler settings page in LSC. Their plugin is built for enterprise use which either doesn’t pre-caching as much, or simply shouldn’t allow it on multi-tenant scenarios as you see with Kinsta/WPE, etc.
Hi, Johnny !Before heading to have a look at WP Performance (because I’m aware of the rest of the plugins listed by you in this article ) , I’ll share what I ve been using for years;
1) For Page caching – Comet Cache
2) For CSS & JavaScript processing – WP Super Minify ( only minifies the code )+ Fast Velocity Minify. Inlines,Defers Async ,etc.Has a button to flush its cache manually on Admin top toolbar.
3) Zend Opcache- manual set by me via directives in php.ini. Cleaning it manually via Opcache Manager plugin by Pierre Lannoy or via WP Opcache plugin
Both of them work great 🙂
4) dB caching via APCu. Cleaning it manually via ( forgot the name. Sorry!)
5) APO from Cloudflare .
Plus I delve a lot in their documentation about CF workers.
* Could you please make your FB group private?
I’ll explain: it will be visibile in Facebook Search results. However what we comment in it will be visible only to its members
Sadly , we Bulgarians ,do not support each other but the vast majority use dirty trick to improve their businesses hampering everyone else.
Best regards from Bulgaria and a Happy New Year’s Eve!
I have a blog with about 5 thousand pages, however traffic is just a little, and many pages are with adsense in arms (I don’t know what is happening, sometimes it seems and sometimes not). I use liteSpeed server, which cache do you think I should use?
My website: https://baudasdicas.net/
You’re literally on the page that answers your questions…
Hello Johnny,
Thank you for your blog infos.
Here I have to give some info about your no. 1 tip: I tried it on three pages (one more then once) and it crashed the whole sites directly after installing. No kidding. Had to restore all of them. Could not believe that, so I did it again. Same outcome.
The plugin is not maintained for 8 month now. I think you should check it again. For me it was a really crappy experience to follow this advice. Not the others though.
Best regards
Jonn
I’ve never had any issues with it. I’m awfully curious to see what settings you put.
My WP install goes down after installing. Cannot even activate. Nginx. Other cachin tools ok. Though running with keycdn cache enabler/ao.
Hmmm, that’s very weird for sure. But yeah…NGINX can be better with other plugins, too. Maybe that one isn’t meant for NGINX.
best cache plugin for aapanel Nginx?
Have you tried my recommendations?
i found no recommendations for nginx here .