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How to get the WordPress cache plugin that works

There are many WordPress plugins you can use. Each of their developers claimed their plugin was the fastest. The rest claimed their plugin was the simplest and easiest to use. Not only that, there are even those paid or premium plugins for such purpose. Then, how to get the WordPress cache plugin that really works? Read on.

Test, test, and test by yourself

That’s the main key to get the caching plugin that really works. 

Here are why:

  • The plugin developers claimed their plugin is the best. It makes sense. They want to promote their own. 

  • There is no one best WordPress plugin for all of this world’s needs. This is why there are many WordPress plugins out there. Even the Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com are building their own caching plugin. And of course, they claimed it to be the fastest one.

  • There are even more websites that make a comparison report, which in our opinion are meaningless for your own WordPress site.

  • Because there are simply too many variables to depend on such a benchmark among the plugins. We’ll go to details about this at the bottom.

  • Every plugin had its own advantages and disadvantages, and this varied from one WordPress to another one.

How to test if that caching plugin really works?

Use tools like Pingdom Tools (tools.pingdom.com), GTMetrix, and Google Pagespeed Insight. Just look for each of them on Google. Those three are really popular.

I had a short story about using those tools.

It revives this tech blog without any plugins at the several first days.  I do this intentionally to see how this VeeroTech host performed.

After I published several new posts on the first five days, I tried to do performance benchmarking using those three: Pingdom, GTMetrix and Google Pagespeed insight. 

  • Pingdom average results are between 2 -3 seconds.

  • GTMetrix average results are around 4 seconds.

  • Google Pagespeed insight shows the result that’s close to the Pingdom tool.

Not bad at all. Especially, given the fact that I installed more than 20 plugins and Jetpack plugin is among them, with all modules are activated.

Several plugins did not really work

I won’t mention the plugin name which did not really work. Because, what did not work for me, can work for someone else, and vice versa.

As I already said above, there are simply too many variables to depend. 

Let’s take an example.

I started with the plugin that had the most installations on WordPress. Then, I simply activate, and turn on the cache and test manually.

All of those tools (Pingdom, GTMetrix and Google Pagespeed) did not show any differences. I only notice Pingdom shows a bit of improvement on the page’s load time by half seconds.

After that, I deactivate and remove it. The next plugin I tried is the one that’s built by the same company who built Jetpack.

The result is sadly just similar to the first plugin.

The third one is the plugin that’s suggested by VeeroTech itself. It’s a plugin for the Litespeed web server.

Unfortunately, the result is still the same. No significant improvements at all.

Not sure what’s going on, and I don’t have time to debug and trace the real cause of this problem. 

I don’t want to deactivate each plugin and install one by one because each of them had customized setting and I am afraid by doing so, I will need to go through the customization again.

The last plugin,  which did work is not as popular as the rest of the plugins I had tried earlier.

Too many variables to depend

Finally, we got to the point where I will mention what are those variables.

  • The web hosting you use.

  • The server’s configuration

  • The web server used to run your WordPress site. My host, VeeroTech runs my WP site on top of the Litespeed web server. While my old host, Namecheap, as far as I remembered, run it on the top of Apache.

  • Each web servers had its own configuration and can vary between different web hosting.

  • Even with the plugin that’s specific for the Litespeed web server, in my case, it did not work. So, there are even more unknown variables to consider

  • Maybe the other plugins are interfering the work of the cache plugin I installed? Who knows. I don’t have a chance to investigate it further.

Conclusion

So the conclusion is you need to test each plugin by yourself, do benchmark, and see the result. If that works, stick with that plugin. If not, go to try another plugin, even if that plugin is not among the popular WordPress plugins.


Categories: WordPress  

Tags: wordpress