The Best Caching Plugins for WooCommerce

0:00Page Caching for WooCommerce: Reliability Beats Speed

Hello from WP Speed Fix. In this video we're going to talk about WooCommerce caching plugins, and plugins that help WooCommerce speed. If you're on this video, you're probably looking to make your WooCommerce site faster, so let's talk through several plugins and tools that we use for WooCommerce optimization. It's not just caching plugins, but let's run through the list. Let's start with the typical caching plugins. There are really two that we use and recommend.

One thing to keep in mind with speed optimization is that reliability beats speed. We want to err on the side of caution, especially with a WooCommerce site. We want to be conservative, and we want reliable plugins we can trust. We don't want to just go and use the most complex, complicated plugin. We want something that is reliable as opposed to as fast as humanly possible, where things break. These are the two plugins we've used on thousands of sites. They are not necessarily the fastest, but they are the most reliable. Like I said, reliability beats speed.

In terms of our selection criteria for these plugins, we would put these two at the top and every other plugin secondary to that. We get a lot of questions about LiteSpeed. LiteSpeed isn't necessarily faster than any other web server. Nginx is faster than LiteSpeed. It just has a lot of good marketing. The LiteSpeed plugin we tend to avoid. It's very complicated, it has a lot of settings, and if you get one of those settings wrong, you can often break your WooCommerce site. Again, reliability beats speed. You're better off with one of these plugins that are a little bit simpler, so you won't have issues with the site because you've overoptimized something.

That said, you'll see there's a note here, and I'll put these in the video notes: be conservative with JavaScript optimization on WooCommerce. WooCommerce and WordPress is a JavaScript-based CMS, and if you mess with the JavaScript too much you're going to break things. You don't want to break cart and checkout, and those especially are very JavaScript heavy. Specifically, I'm talking about a couple of options inside both these plugins where you can pause or delay the JavaScript, delaying executing the JavaScript until the user interacts with the site.

That makes the site look really good in something like a GTmetrix test or a Google PageSpeed Insights test, but it doesn't necessarily make it faster in the real world. More often than not it will make it slower, because things are waiting on the user to interact with the site before they load and render. It will also break things. You're basically creating JavaScript errors that are not visible but are breaking things to do with cart and checkout. Often it's menus or active elements, things that do things on the page, where it's not immediately evident that they're broken. So just keep that in mind: when you're optimizing, be conservative, especially with a WooCommerce site.

The two we recommend are WP Rocket and FlyingPress, at wprocketplugin.com and flyingpress.net. Let me talk about them for a minute. WP Rocket is probably a bit more simplified, so if you're DIYing, this one is probably a better option. It has fewer features, but a lot of complexity under the bonnet, so you can do a lot with it, and it has a lot of add-on plugins if you want to get really specific and dig into things. So WP Rocket is probably better for the DIYer. Prices are about the same. I think this one is about 60 bucks a year, 59 a year per website, so pretty good in terms of price.

FlyingPress, let's just go back, I just logged in there. Pricing, what are we looking at? Similar, 50 bucks a year, so same same in terms of price, not much different. FlyingPress is a bit more complex and has a few more options, and because of that it's probably more appropriate for someone who's a bit more tech-savvy. Those are the two we recommend: WP Rocket for the real DIYer who doesn't really know what they're doing and just needs something that works, and FlyingPress if you're more technical and you want to get in and play with settings. So that's page caching.

Keep in mind that with plugins for speed optimization, a lot of them have crossover. A lot of them will do multiple things. They don't just do caching, they do other speed optimizations as well. You don't want to use two caching plugins, but you can certainly use multiple optimization plugins. You can use WP Rocket or FlyingPress, and you can use Perfmatters on top. So long as you don't duplicate the features, meaning you don't turn the same features on in both plugins, you'll be okay. Some plugins are better at some things than others, so we'll talk about that in a minute.

4:43Database and Object Caching With Redis

Let's go to the next one. That's page caching. The next one is database caching or object caching. This will speed up your site in any way that is reliant on the database. That's logged into the back end, managing orders, doing things with products, that sort of thing, so managing the e-commerce functions. On the front end of the site, particularly for users who are logging in, it covers add to cart and anything to do with cart and checkout. It's going to make those operations faster. It reduces the database load, and it's going to have more effect on a bigger website.

To use object caching you need a couple of things. You need an object caching plugin, but the hosting also has to support the software required to drive that, the server software, which is Redis. Typically the hosts we recommend on our WP Speed Fix website all have some form of object caching. Some of them have Redis, some of them have Memcached, and some of them you don't need a plugin, it just works out of the box. So this is kind of a caching box to check for WooCommerce.

Here is the Redis Cache plugin, which is free. I've already loaded it up. There is a paid version, but the free version, unless you have a big site, is probably fine for you. Again, you need to have Redis installed on your hosting to make this work, but that will speed up anything related to the database, and anything related to users logged into the site doing things. So that's object caching or database caching.

6:14Using Cloudflare and APO as a CDN for WooCommerce

Then you have a content delivery network or CDN. A CDN is a network of servers around the world that host part of the website. Basically you're moving the workload off the hosting onto the CDN. The CDN we use and recommend is Cloudflare. It's pretty much the biggest CDN in the world, and about 20% of all website traffic goes through Cloudflare. There is a $5 a month add-on called APO, and here's the page for it. I'll link to it. It's Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress, which is a fancy way of saying it does caching at the Cloudflare layer.

It's similar to page caching. Basically the entire page is cached on Cloudflare's network, and particularly if you have a site targeting international traffic, that's going to help a lot. It's only five bucks a month, so it's dirt cheap. It used to only be available on the $200 a month plan, just to give you some reference there. It'll do a few things. It'll move even more of the workload off the hosting onto Cloudflare's network. It also reduces the impact of geography on site speed. Anytime traffic has to travel across an ocean, it's basically going to make it 1 second slower.

With Cloudflare, that kind of shortcuts and solves that, because the pages are loading off the CDN node, or Cloudflare node, closest to the visitor. It frees up resources from the hosting, and it allows the site to cater for much more traffic, because you basically have more horsepower there to serve the website. It also removes the impact of geography on site speed. Given the price, it's well worth doing, so we recommend that for all our customers.

It has intelligence built in. Once somebody starts shopping, they put something in the cart or they log into WordPress, that layer of caching turns off. So you don't have those caching conflicts that you might have experienced in the past with other plugins. So that's the Cloudflare APO service.

8:13Fine-Tuning WooCommerce With Perfmatters

Let's talk about these other plugins and optimizations. We just talked about Perfmatters before. That is kind of a general-purpose WordPress speed optimization or performance plugin. You can turn on and off a whole bunch of settings inside WordPress and WooCommerce in this plugin, so it's great at doing that. One of the things that we love is around lazy loading. It can set the priority of the loading order to load images on the page first. I think up to the first five images it will load as priority, which will speed up the site render. Particularly when you've got someone clicking through category pages and product pages with multiple images, that can speed things up substantially.

That's one of the ways we use it, but it has a lot of features in there you can turn on and off. It probably has an explanation here on the website, or a list. Yeah, here we go. You can see here you really get into all these granular, fine details. You can really get in there and optimize at a very granular level that the other plugins won't do. Like I said, you can use this in conjunction with FlyingPress or WP Rocket as long as you don't cross over the optimizations. You're not trying to do the same optimization in two different plugins, like for example having lazy loading running on both plugins. You don't want to do that. Just keep that in mind and you'll be fine using multiple optimization plugins. That's Perfmatters.

9:44Robots.txt and Database Setup for WooCommerce

There are a few other things here that I'd recommend you do. If you're looking at this page or this video, you're interested in WooCommerce speed optimization, so I'll link you to a few videos here. First, tuning the robots.txt file. We have a video on that. Particularly on a WooCommerce site, there's a lot of strange crawling going on. We have a templated robots.txt file you can use, and you can see the link there, with more in the video, that will reduce load on the site and help boost your SEO. It's worth spending time looking at that.

Then there's a video here on database optimization. There are two things you want to do with WooCommerce to make the database fast. One, you want to use High Performance Order Storage, which is a new database format in WooCommerce that speeds things up. It has new database tables to manage products and orders and anything related to e-commerce, which will speed up those e-commerce functions. The other thing you want to do is make sure you're running InnoDB database tables. Database tables in WordPress and MySQL come in two different formats, the older MyISAM and the newer InnoDB.

InnoDB is faster, and the reason why, and there's detail in the video, is that with MyISAM only one write to the database can happen at a time. On a busy WooCommerce site there are a lot of things being written to the database, so the writes essentially queue up for each table. With the newer InnoDB tables, multiple writes can happen to a database table at the same time, so long as it's not the same row. It's kind of similar to the old style of emailing around an Excel spreadsheet, as opposed to using something like Google Sheets where multiple people can be logged in at once and making edits.

Basically the newer database tables are faster because those writes don't queue. That can make quite a big difference on a WooCommerce site, because people are adding to the cart all day long and doing things with the cart and checkout. It will speed that up. There's more detail in that video about those two things. There are several other optimizations, but those are two big ones that will move the needle. It'll noticeably make the back end of a WooCommerce site faster, and cart and checkout noticeably faster as well.

11:39Tracking Real-World Speed With Vital Signs Tracker

If you want to get into speed stuff in granular detail, have a look at Vital Signs Tracker. This is our site speed tracking app. One problem we have with Core Web Vitals and site speed in general is the tools and data. We either use Google PageSpeed Insights, which is a test. It's synthetic, it's called a lab test or synthetic test. It's not real, so it doesn't reflect real-world speed. We can use Core Web Vitals data from Google, but that's based on a 28-day average and doesn't give us very specific information. It's not very granular or fine-tuned, so we can't take really granular, fine-tuned actions or get insights from it.

So we built Vital Signs Tracker to grab the same data Google is grabbing, but we can run really fine-grained reports. We can install it today and in a couple of days' time have a lot of data on what's happening on the website. That allows us to see which pages are slow or fast, and why they're slow or fast, and then do something about it. Here's an example. I've just run a report for the last 14 days for a client. You can see the high-level data like you might have seen in other tools or other reports. This one is green across the board, and I'll show you an issue that this site has that most WooCommerce sites have as well, where paid traffic is slow.

If I just do Google Ads source, and this one is a work in progress, you see here this is paid traffic, Google Ads traffic, and we've gone from green to some yellows, but you can see we actually have some red. This is paid traffic because this customer started a new campaign doing display advertising, and the site wasn't set up to ignore these query strings. So this traffic is not cached at all. It's all hitting the site uncached, which means it's slow. We're seeing a lot of red here from paid traffic, which is bad, because that's our most expensive traffic. We definitely don't want it to be slow like that.

Vital Signs Tracker can give you a report like this of the data across the entire site and allow you to pinpoint what's going on. That's especially true with a WooCommerce site, if you're using any particular kind of marketing tools in conjunction with Google Shopping ads, like click fraud tracking or even something like CallRail. Vital Signs Tracker can be very useful for digging into that data and seeing how the site is actually performing for different types of users.

We also do things like this one, which is not a WooCommerce site, but we do have segments here where we can look at logged-in versus logged-out user speed. That's very important for WooCommerce because you have a lot of users logged in. You can see the logged-in performance versus the logged-out. Quite often logged-out will be fine and logged-in is really slow. One way to help fix that is with caching those logged-in sessions, but we can do a lot with Vital Signs Tracker. Check it out at vitalsignstracker.com.

14:46Free Tools and Getting Help From WP Speed Fix

That's pretty much it for this video. We'll put these notes in the description. If you want help with your site, go to wpspeedfix.com and we can do it for you. If you go to the website, on the homepage there is a free audit you can request. If you want paid help, basically request an audit there, and one of our team will look at the site and come back to you.

If you just want to test drive free tools, we have a bunch of free tools here. No opt-in is required for any of these, and they take 60 to 90 seconds. There's a free SEO audit, and a free Core Web Vitals report. This will only work for established sites with some traffic, but it'll tell you how the site is performing. There's also a free WordPress site speed test that is powered by AI. It'll tell you a whole bunch of optimizations you might not be aware of on the site. That's pretty much it for this video. I will leave you to it. If you have any questions, post in the comments and we will come back to you. Cheers.