The best cache plugins to speed up your WordPress sites and where I would use them!

The plugins are listed in order of what I would recommend for most people to try from first to last. In my personal use case, I love LiteSpeed Cache the most for my high-traffic sites (best performance, features, reliability) and then use Swift Performance Lite or WP Performance for smaller sites. Swift Pro and WP Rocket are nice for clients (and bigger sites) who can pay and need something better than a free plugin.

1. WP Performance (FREE)

WP Performance

• If you don’t know what you’re doing, start here.
• Very easy to use.
• Safe to play with caching and won’t break your site. Please don’t try to enable every feature.
• Works well for all types of sites.
• Recommended settings (coming soon)

2. Swift Performance (FREE & PAID)

Swift Performance Lite

• FREE free is the best free cache plugin out there (along with LiteSpeed Cache).
• Tons of features, a bit complicated for newbies and risky since they enable stuff that break or slow down their site.
• PAID version has even more incredible features. Works great.
• I recommend Swift free for sites below 400 pages and/or fewer than 10k hits/month. Above that, you should use the pro version.
• Swift Pro is especially great for sites with many pages but little traffic (thanks to its aggressive preload function).
• Swift does sometimes have the annoying white page issue. If you can’t resolve it, you’ll have to switch to another cache plugin.
• Recommended settings

3. LiteSpeed Cache (FREE)

LiteSpeed Cache

• Honestly the best cache plugin out there. Tons of feature, enterprise-grade performance and reliability. (It’s my favorite.)
• Only drawback is you need LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server to use its caching features.
• Best for sites with many pages and high traffic. I don’t recommend for sites with little traffic (below 10K hits/month). Small sites are better with WPP or Swift since they can precache.

4. WP Rocket (PAID)

• Simple to use and great documentation. Still good amount of features, and very reliable.
• If Swift (FREE) and WP Performance doesn’t work for you and you’re not on LiteSpeed servers, WP Rocket is a solid choice.
• WP Rocket is good for all sites.
• Only reason why some people don’t like WP Rocket is the cost or lack of granular features. Depending on the user, it’s ease-of-use can be a pro or a con.

5. FlyingPress (PAID)

• Quality cache plugin built by a passionate speed specialist.
• Very simple and easy to use yet has advanced/unique functions not found in other cache plugins.
• Still maturing and might still have some bugs but I think they’re already being worked out as this is written.