Best Plugin For WordPress Cache – Speed Up WordPress

Caching is one of the best ways to speed up your WordPress site or any other site. With caching your site doesn’t have to make numerous request to the database or run heavy PHP scripts every time a user visits your site. The first visitor will go through the process then the output of the request generated are saved as temporary files at a location so that the visitors who come afterwards will view the saved cache files so that your site doesn’t have to go through the ordeal of running heavy scripts or query the database and get back the results.

This greatly speed ups the page load process and is often recommended for better performance. There are many cache plugins that you will find on wordpress plugin list. We are going to discuss about the best ones here.

1. Hyper-Cache

The plugin speeds up wordpress significantly compared to any other wordpress cache plugin. This plugin manages both plain and g zipped compressed pages for browser with gzip supported browsers.  This plugin is a based on a new cache system and works both with Linux and Microsoft IIS server. It’s much easier to configure and it cleans up the cache regularly to lower the disk usage.

Here are Hyper-Cache main features:-

• esay installation (from 2.5.9 version): just activate Hyper Cache and it works with a set of default values
• every cached page will be served without accessing the database
• gzip support for enabled browser with gzip caching (no page recompression on each request)
• four invalidation modes
• cache autoclean on configurable time interval
• “urls to bypass” configurable (with two kind of matching)
• Global Translator plugin detection to avoid double caching
• mobile browser detection with two separate caches (wp-pda plugin compatible)
• low disk usage option
• redirects and 404 caching
• feed and home caching separate control
• user agents configurable rejection
• easy to install and configure, no file hacking or modification need
• last but not least the author will always listen to you!

2.W3 Total Cache

This plugin is also top of the line with many configuration options to configure. But it works pretty well with default configurations. This options offers some great features like page caching, minifying, database caching, content delivery networks to improve the overall performance of your wordpress blog. With Minify and HTTP compression for HTML, JavaScript and CSS the plugin promises to save you 80% of your bandwidth savings. Use this plugin if you want some control over the cache configurations for better performance.

Here are W3 Total Cache features:

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
• Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
• Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
• Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
• Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
• Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
• Caching of objects in memory or on disk
• Minification of posts and pages and feeds
• Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
• Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
• Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
• JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
• Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
• Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

3. WP Super Cache

This is a very robust cache plugin that uses multiple cache engines. Users that login, post comments are shows cache from a legacy cache engine while other visitors get a super-cached static html page. The plugin has tons of options and should be used with care. The plugin also cleans up the cache files overtime which saves you disk space.

WP Super Cache provides these features:

• A plugin and hooks system. A common complaint with WP Cache was that hacking was required to make it work nicely with other plugins. Now you can take advantage of the simple plugin system built in to change how or when pages are cached. Use do_cacheaction() and add_cacheaction() like you would with WordPress hooks. Plugins can add their own options to the admin page too.
• Works well with WordPress MU in VHOST or non-VHOST configuration. Each blog’s cache files are identified to improve performance.
• Normal WP-Cache files are now split in two. Meta files go in their own directory making it much faster to scan and update the cache.
• Includes this WP-Cache and protected posts fix.
• Automatically disable gzip compression in WordPress instead of dying.
• As Akismet and other spam fighting tools have improved, the cache will only be invalidated if a comment is definitely not spam.
• A “lock down” button. I like to think of this as my “Digg Proof” button. This basically prepares your site for a heavy digging or slashdotting. It locks down the static cache files and doesn’t delete them when a new comment is made.
• Supercache static files can be regenerated while serving a slightly out of date file. This will significantly lower the load on a busy server with lots of traffic and comments. Think of it as an automatic “lock down mode” for every page on your site.
• Automatic updating of your .htaccess file. (Backup your .htaccess before installing the plugin!)
• Don’t super cache any request with GET parameters.
• Better version checking of wp-cache-config.php and advanced-cache.php in case you’re using an old one.
• Better support for Microsoft Windows.
• Properly serve cached static files on Red Hat/Cent OS systems or others that have an entry for gzip in /etc/mime.types.
• The Reject URI function now uses regular expressions.
• Supports the Bad Behaviour plugin if installed (Half on mode only).
• Supports plugins that show a different theme to mobile devices.

These are some of the best cache plugins for performance. While there are other cache plugins like WP-Cache, WP Widget Cache, DB Cache Reloaded for WP3.1+, the above mentioned plugins provide much better performance boost and speed up the WordPress site.