If there’s one thing the Internet is good for it’s reviews – some of them are actually honest. A million writeups for every subject under the sun but, when you want to know what the best (in your chosen subject) is, a popularity contest or a ‘made for ads’ summary page (without any actual opinion) is not going to give you the answers you’re looking for.
Which WordPress cache plugin is best for me?
What does a caching plugin do? Here’s the ‘in a nutshell’ summary:
A caching plugin helps to speed up your website. It makes sure little things like style sheets (CSS) and javascript files (js) are minified (compressed) so they deliver to the user faster, it makes use of every available way of reducing the amount of data that has to be sent to the user for each page load and makes sure the most necessary components of your website load first so that your website can render faster for the user and moves unnecessary content to the end of the queue.
Caching shaves crucial seconds off your website’s load time!
That’s the question I went in search of an answer for. In addition to my own little bit of experience with speeding up WordPress websites, I wanted to know what the interweb folks were saying and, the main objective, I wanted to come up wth a definitive about which WordPress cache plugin was the most suitable for the websites I manage.
There’s a clear winner about the most widely used plugin for overall site speed (at the moment that is W3 Super Cache with over 2 million installs) and that should influence my decision slightly but I don’t necessarily want the one with the most options (I’m not a rocket scientist).
Google say your website should load on any device in 2 seconds or less and their search rankings are influenced by website load speed
The reason I always overlook WP Super Cache is because few people seem to recommend it and that makes me wonder why. Also, there are so many options.
- WP Fastest Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache
- Autoptimize
- SG Optimizer
- and several others.
I assess plugins in the same way I assess many things and that is through the feedback from actual users, not the glowing (or other) opinions of a blogger. The percentage of ratings that are 1-star are important to me because that gives me an indication of how likely I am to experience problems. I don’t like problems.
The following was updated in March 2019.
- 2.52% of WP Fastest Cache reviewers gave it only 1 star.
- 10.73% of W3 Total Cache reviewers gave it just 1 star.
- 13.16% of WP Super Cache reviewers rated it 1 star.
- 1.76% of LiteSpeed Cache reviewers gave it only 1 star.
- 5.27% of Autoptimize reviewers said it was only getting 1 star.
- 11.11% gave SiteGround’s SG Optimizer just 1 star.
Reviews tell you more than glowing hype written on blog posts surrounded by adverts
It’s interesting to see how many people actually commented and gave a star rating for a plugin compared to how many people use it.
From the updated data above it would seem the most reliable and trouble free cache plugin is LiteSpeed Cache with an average star-rating of 4.9 and less than 2% of people who gave a review giving it only 1 star and 95.43% rating it 5-stars. WP Fastest Cache is pretty close to a similar score.
Looking at the 2 most commonly used cache plugins, only 70% of W3 Total Cache reviews and 73% of WP Super Cache reviews were 5-star with 10.73% and 13.16% of reviews getting just 1 star.
WordPress Caching plugins are not plug-and-play but, reading some of the reviews, I get the feeling a lot of people think they are
The data alone makes it difficult to choose and I think that’s a consequence of people giving negative reviews on the back of a slight glitch, expecting the plugin to do more than it does or the user not reading the manual or following step by step guides. These things are not plug-and-play but, reading some of the reviews, I get the feeling a lot of people think they are.