The Best WordPress Caching Plugins & Why You Need Them

0:00What Caching and Page Caching Are

WP Speed Fix here. In this video we're going to talk about WordPress caching plugins, the best WordPress caching plugins, and why you need a caching plugin. I'm going to try and keep this video quite short, as it doesn't really need to be long. Let's talk about caching first, and what page caching specifically is, to get really technical.

Broadly speaking, a cache is where some work has been done by a server and the result of that work is stored somewhere for quick and fast retrieval. No matter what type of caching it is, whether it's database caching, page caching, edge caching or CDN caching, it means the work has been pre-done. The work has been pre-done and it's saved, ready to go. What that means for you as a visitor, or as someone who runs a site, is that all that background processing doesn't have to happen when someone accesses a resource.

When we talk about page caching in the context of WordPress, it means that all the database lookups and all the PHP processing are done in advance. WordPress uses the programming language PHP. All that work is done in advance and saved in an HTML file, ready to serve up to the user. To make a WordPress site fast, the number one thing it needs is page caching. Without page caching, every time you load a page, all that work has to be done. Depending on how many plugins you have, how complex your site is and everything else going on with it, that page building process can take anywhere from a second to 10 seconds, even 20 seconds. Having the cache in place brings that time down to milliseconds. Instead of that page taking 1 to 10 seconds to serve up to a visitor, it can be served up in 100 or 200 milliseconds. That's a big speed difference, so that's why we need caching, and that's what page caching does.

1:58WP Rocket vs FlyingPress

In the context of WordPress, there are really two plugins we recommend. There's a lot of stuff around the web. You can read about plugins, technical specs and all sorts of nonsense, and you can go down the rabbit hole comparing detailed specifications. That's a mistake. We've optimized over 5,000 sites and there are only two plugins we use. One of them is WP Rocket, at WPRocketPlugin.com, and the other is FlyingPress, at FlyingPress.net. Those are pretty much the leading page caching plugins, or WordPress caching plugins.

They're two very different types of plugins. WP Rocket is very popular, very mature and very stable. We generally use that because one of our heuristics, one of the important things we talk about when we talk about site speed, is that reliability beats speed. You want your site to be reliable, and you don't want to sacrifice reliability for speed. What we've found over thousands of websites is that WP Rocket is very reliable and very stable, but it doesn't have all the bleeding edge features that FlyingPress has. So if reliability is important to you, then WP Rocket is the plugin to go with. If cutting edge features are important and you are technical, FlyingPress is probably a better plugin for you.

FlyingPress is more technical and has more features, in a sense. It's still very easy to set up, but what we've found is that for more complex websites it can sometimes create problems. So again, come back to reliability beats speed. If you're technical, you understand how to fix things, and you have the time and energy to spend fiddling around fixing things, then FlyingPress is fine. But if you care about reliability, if you're a marketing manager and you know the site needs to be online, otherwise it's your ass on the line, then WP Rocket is better.

These plugins do a whole bunch more than just page caching. They do speed optimization on top of that. FlyingPress has more features. It has integration with Cloudflare, so you can actually save money, because in some cases you don't need the Cloudflare APO service if you use FlyingPress. They both have CDN features built in. We would recommend not using the CDN, or content delivery network, built into WP Rocket and using Cloudflare instead, with a direct Cloudflare account. FlyingPress can integrate directly with your Cloudflare account. But like I said, FlyingPress has more features and more knobs and dials to play with. That's not necessarily a good thing.

4:44Do You Still Need a Caching Plugin if Your Host Has Caching?

Now let's talk about when your host has caching built in. Some hosts, for example WP Engine or Kinsta, have page caching built in. Our hosting platform, WP Alpha, has caching built in. You can turn it on, but it doesn't have it on by default. We would still recommend using a caching plugin even if you're on one of these hosts. The caching plugin still does speed optimization on top of that. It does things like deferring JavaScript, lazy loading, pre-building the cache and managing the cache. When you update a page on the website, it will go and clear the cache of that page, so it's refreshed and the new, edited version of that page is available and pre-processed, ready to go.

So even if you're on one of these hosts, we'd recommend still using a caching plugin. Again, we'd probably lean towards WP Rocket, because that's the simpler setup if the host already has caching. The plugin will turn off its own internal page caching if that's the case. So again, same answer: even if the host has caching, we recommend using the plugin, and one of these two.

5:54Where Cloudflare Fits In and How the Plugins Overlap

Next is where Cloudflare fits into this. We quite often have questions about Cloudflare versus WP Rocket. It's not one or the other. Cloudflare is a content delivery network that does some speed optimization. It also does some firewall and security work, and it does something called edge caching, which is different to page caching. So it's not an either/or. You would use Cloudflare as well as one of these plugins.

In terms of the speed optimization side, a lot of people get confused about the role of these different plugins and using multiple plugins. Basically there's a checklist of speed optimization steps you should do to have the site loading fast. That would be things like image lazy loading, YouTube video lazy loading, deferring the JavaScript, and maybe delaying the execution of the JavaScript until the user interacts with the site. There's a list of 50 to 100 different technical speed optimization tactics, and in some cases they can be done by the caching plugin, or at Cloudflare, or on the web hosting. They could be done in several different areas, or there may even be other plugins you have installed to do different tasks. For example, when we do speed optimization, often we'll use WP Rocket and Perfmatters, and we'll move some of the functions to the Perfmatters plugin because it's better at those on that particular site. That might have to do with the site layout, something specific to that site that just works better with that plugin.

So keep in mind that, broadly speaking, you don't want to duplicate functionality. You don't want two things doing the same optimization. In some small cases there is some crossover. For example, if you're using an image optimization plugin to compress images, which we would recommend because images are always going to be better if they're compressed on the hosting, we would also still recommend you turn on image compression in Cloudflare, because they're two different types of image compression. That's an example where you might have a couple of overlapping features. Just to be clear on that, broadly speaking you don't want them overlapping.

8:13Caching Plugins We Avoid: LiteSpeed, WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache and Others

Now, common questions we get. Should we use the LiteSpeed plugin? There's a lot of stuff around the web about the LiteSpeed web server being the fastest and the LiteSpeed plugin being the best and all this sort of stuff, and almost every single site we've seen with the LiteSpeed plugin is broken in some way. The amount of settings and configuration you can do with the LiteSpeed plugin is massively overkill. It can be made to go faster, but 99.9% of WordPress users and developers don't know what they're doing. They don't understand the nuance enough not to break things. Again, we come back to our guiding heuristic that reliability beats speed. We never want to sacrifice reliability for a marginal, tiny increase in speed. So that's why we'd say avoid using the LiteSpeed plugin.

There are some other plugins around the web that we have used in the past that we generally don't recommend. One of them is WP Fastest Cache. It's an older plugin and it's great, but it is missing some features on the modern web. There are also some old plugins that are only compatible with it, so in some cases keep in mind that you may have another plugin, a shopping cart or LMS or something, that needs a different caching plugin. If you have a complex site, that might be a consideration for you.

Another plugin we've used is W3 Total Cache. When we first started WP Speed Fix 10 years ago, we used W3 Total Cache, one because it was free, and two because WP Rocket was brand new and it wasn't great at the time. It was not so reliable. So again we come back to our guiding heuristic. There were a lot of features in W3 Total Cache, but the plugin owner has changed and the values behind the plugin have changed. For most users, for someone who's watching a video on caching plugins, WP Rocket would be a simpler, better approach for a DIYer, and then FlyingPress for someone who's more technical.

There are other plugins that have added caching features over the years. For example, WP Optimize is one. We wouldn't recommend that because it's too simple and there aren't enough features in there. Remember, most of these plugins come with caching and with additional speed optimization features. If you're using something like WP Optimize, you're going to have to use other plugins to do some additional things, so keep that in mind. There are other plugins around the web that are hosting specific. For example, Cloudways has its Breeze plugin, but if we're doing optimization for a Cloudways site, we'd pull that out and use WP Rocket or FlyingPress. SiteGround Optimizer is a similar kind of thing. We would prefer to use one of these two plugins as opposed to the inbuilt plugin with SiteGround.

11:16Why You Should Not Minify or Combine CSS and JavaScript

That's pretty much it in terms of these plugins. Falling down the rabbit hole of all the weird and wonderful technical features they have is not going to pay off. If you're getting so technical that you're looking at things like minification or this or that, you're probably going too far into it and you're probably going to end up breaking your site. That's probably another thing: there are some settings in some of these plugins that get removed over time. For example, minification and combining CSS and JavaScript is a really bad idea. If you're DIYing, don't minify anything, and don't combine the JavaScript and CSS. On the modern web, in 2026 when we're making this video, it makes things slower, and it breaks other things down the line.

Minifying CSS and JavaScript does nothing for speed. It does create unique temporary file names for JavaScript and CSS files, which means it breaks their ability to be cached by CDNs like Cloudflare and by the browser, and repeat visitors might end up getting a broken website experience. So again, reliability over speed. Also, modern web servers do a whole bunch of compression. They do gzip compression and Brotli compression, which means minification does nothing. That's just wasting time, it's also wasting server resources, and you're running the risk of breaking things.

Combining CSS and JavaScript are old optimizations that are no longer relevant on the modern web, and you create a similar problem to minifying, where you create temporary file names with all the JavaScript put into one file. When you clear the cache, that file name gets changed again, so the cached copy in browser caches, for visitors that have been to the site, and in places like Cloudflare, is no longer correct. You get situations where the website's broken when users go there. So that's one caveat to keep in mind with caching plugins: don't just blanket turn on all the features, particularly because caching plugins will still have minify and combine CSS and JavaScript in there. You just don't want to use those.

13:12Integrate the Plugin With Cloudflare and Keep the Cache Fresh

That's pretty much it. Another note to keep in mind is that you want to integrate these plugins with Cloudflare. They have a section where you can integrate them with the Cloudflare API key. One thing these plugins are doing is managing the cache as well. That's why it's important, on hosts that have caching built in like WP Engine, that they're managing the cache in terms of building it. They build it in advance, working through the sitemap and building it from there. Then if you update the pages, it will clear the page cache and it will also clear Cloudflare's cache.

That's also important for sites like WooCommerce sites where you're selling products all the time. If you have low stock counts on products, you might have three units or five units and they go out of stock, then you need the caching plugin to update that page to show the stock status reflected. That way you're not selling stuff that's out of stock or creating issues for customers or a bad customer experience.

14:18Pricing and Where to Get Help

So that's pretty much it. WPRocketPlugin.com and FlyingPress.net, here are the websites. They're both paid, but they're both dirt cheap. One year of WP Rocket is 60 bucks, $59. You'll see FlyingPress is probably the same. Yes, $59, exactly the same. It's well worth it, because one lost customer just due to a slow site is going to be worth more than 59 bucks. So it's really a no-brainer purchase.

If you want help with your site, if you're struggling with site speed and want someone to do it for you, you can head over to our website, wpspeedfix.com, and request a free site audit on the homepage. One of the team will have a look at the site and come back to you. If you need help with something or you want to run some free tools, we have a free SEO audit, a Core Web Vitals report and a site speed test powered by AI. They all take 60 to 90 seconds to run, completely free, and no opt-in is required, so you can check those out there as well. That's pretty much it. I'll leave you with it. If you have any questions, post in the comment section below and I'm happy to come back to you. Cheers.