One study found that 40% of people abandoned pages that took 3 seconds or more to load. The same study also stated that 47% of people expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds or less. This implies to ensure optimum UX; you’ve to ensure a faster site speed.
When it comes to optimizing your site for faster loading speed and performance boost, you can’t underestimate the role of caching on WordPress. This powerful technology of caching does one thing really well, and that is, making your website superfast.
In fact, better page speed and performance help a site to rank top on SERPs. Is it all about caching? Well, no, there’s more to it. In this guide, I’ll discuss all about caching and why caching plugin is critical to your WordPress site.
To learn more, stay tuned to this guide.
How Caching Plugins Work?
Simply put, when visitors land on your site, their browser contacts your web server. Then, your WordPress site install retrieves information from your database. After that, the web server compiles this data into an HTML page to serve it to the visitors.
Since WordPress generates content continuously, whenever visitors view your page, each time it requests fresh information about your page. This way, viewers have to wait longer until your page is loaded entirely.
This is where caching plugins come into play. Caching plugins create static versions of your content, store frequently accessed data temporarily, and serve that to your visitors. So that whenever visitors revisit your site, they’ll be able to see a cached version.
Why Caching Plugin Is Critical to Your WordPress Site?
As I said before, without caching, visitors have to wait every single time when visiting your site for a long time to download your web pages. Fortunately, browser caching plugins make things easier for visitors by ensuring web pages access your content faster.
In fact, a caching plugin takes you one step further by removing many of the steps that occur when WordPress dynamically generates a page. The advantages aren’t over yet, so let’s see the other reasons why caching plugin is critical to your WordPress site.
- With caching plugins, you can enable various types of server-side caching, such as page caching, mobile caching, user caching, database query caching, opcode caching, and object caching.
- Caching plugins include additional features like GZIP compression, CDN integration, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript minification to boost speed and enhance your site’s performance.
- It enhances the speed and performance of your website. As static cached files load faster than the dynamic database queries, it leads to faster and better performance of your site.
- This also helps you boost engagement and the time users spend on your site.
- Caching also helps to reduce your hosting server load to save server memory and I/O operations.
- Faster websites do not just ensure optimum user experience but also get top ranking in search engines. Shortly speaking, a website that loads faster gets a better ranking faster.
- In this way, it helps your site to drive even more traffic from organic search.
- Overall, a cached website offers a better user experience. It helps users to browse better and faster.
- The cached site also helps save users’ bandwidth since static cached pages are less in terms of file size than dynamic requests. But, to do so, your caching solution must make use of combined and minified JavaScript and CSS, apart from just basic page caching.
That being said, let’s have a look at the best WordPress plugin that you may consider using. This leads us to the next section.
Top Caching Plugins for WordPress
When you search for a WordPress caching plugin, you’ll get quite a lot of options to choose from. There are several free and premium WordPress caching plugins out there to help you enable caching on your site. So, here are the key ones-
- WP Rocket — Best for speed optimization
- Swift Performance — Best for multi-site compatibility
- W3 Total Cache — Best for experienced developers
- WP Super Cache — Best for Customization
- WP Fastest Cache — Best for access to a wide range of tools
Each of these plugins is highly recommended and popular in the WordPress community. All of them come with their own distinct features to provide the best caching support to your site.
Depending on a few factors, like the type of hosting plan you’re with, the number of content on our website, whether your server has been configured correctly, etc., these caching plugins will work differently.
Therefore, in order to choose the best caching plugin for your site, I will recommend testing the site speed first with a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom. Don’t forget to take a note of the result for further comparison.
After that, decide to install the plugin you are considering and activate. Make sure to configure settings as you want, and again run your site speed through the testing tools. Take a note of this result also.
When using a caching plugin, you only need one, and it will be enough. Remember, if you install more than one, it won’t make your site any faster.
Conclusion
Site speed is incredibly crucial for any website’s success. And, it goes without saying, that, caching can help you to optimize your site to perform better, improve ranking, engage audiences, reach more traffic, and ensure maximum UX.
Using caching plugins may seem daunting at first, but in reality, you actually don’t need a lot of technical know-how to implement it on your WordPress site. So, if you still aren’t using any caching plugin for your WordPress site, you’re making a big mistake.
I hope, now from this guide it is clear to you, why caching plugin is critical to your WordPress site. So, start using the most suitable one for your site and aim to get those loading times short and make your site super fast.
So, I’m ending this guide here; if you have any queries, you can Contact Us. Also, don’t forget to share your thoughts about this guide here in the comment section below.
