6 Top WordPress Cache Plugin Tested and Ranked

speeding up your WordPress website isn't simply a case of slapping a cash-in plug-in on your site and hoping for the best but caching plugins do play a significant part in helping you speed up and optimize various different aspects of your site today I've only tested several very popular options out to see how they fare and head-to-head test on the exact same website a website that uses several other plugins that are covered on a lot of my channel now before we take a look at the site and what's being used on it let me just say that any of the premium plugins or services that I use today are not sponsoring this video and haven't given me the plug-in or access to the service I'm paying straight out of my own pocket to be as unbiased as possible which one will come out on top is going to be a total surprise to me as much as it will be to you so without further ado let's take a look at the site and how it's set up and then start testing these plugins out so this is the site we take a look at there's one I've created in a previous video and it's probably very similar to what a lot of us would be using it's a blog based website images search function some custom fields you know those kinds of things to give you a benchmark for a site that's a little bit more customized than just generally your typical blog site so as you can see we've got a range of different recipes there's lots of images on the page itself we've got a nice strong image at the top all those kinds of good things jump over to the plugins section but you can see there are a lot of plugins installed in here to get this full range of functionality so you've got things like advanced custom fields Pro anywhere Elementor Pro custom post type UI elemental custom skin the free and the pro version elemental elemental Pro facet WP the elemental plug-in for that we've got rank mouth SEO search WP we've got some wordpress importers WP reset backup plugins as well so a typical kind of set that you'd have for more comprehensive site if we also take a look then we'll jump over to GT metrics and let's get our benchmark on them so the site is already inserted I've set this up to be using Chrome as a browser based in the closest to my server location which incidentally is SiteGround base in the UK so the service in the UK and we're using this on the London UK connection everything else is stock and default so we're gonna run a couple of tests just to kind of get a full benchmark to see where we are with this so let's just analyze the site let it run through and like I said I'm gonna do three tests on each one of these like I've done with the WordPress themes sort of speed test I did what about a year ago now it's gonna give us a good overall average benchmark okay so there's our results as you can see not too bad a starting point we're using the holo theme if you're wondering what theme we use in and we've got a PageSpeed score of 71 percent I don't why SLO score of 89 percent but taking those out of the equation what will kind of more interested in easy page details 2.5 second load time which is fairly respectable for a non optimized site and a page size of just under one point five megabytes with 65 requests to the server so not a bad starting point but let's use this now I'll run a couple more tests on this to get my benchmark and then we're gonna take a look at installing the first of the caching plugins which is good to be WP rocket okay so all three results are in for the clean and plain site and I'm not gonna go into too much detail right now out to the sort of like the tests and results towards the end of the video but what we find it is there's not a huge difference here with this the plain site there's probably between one and two seconds difference everything else is staying the same across the board which obviously it would for the file size of the requests those things are not going to change on a side-by-side basis so first up we have WP rocket which is probably a very very popular plugin for helping speed up your WordPress website and one that I know a lot of people on both my channel and also inside the Facebook group I use in so I'm interested to see exactly how this phase and like I said at the top of the video this has been purchased out of my own pocket so if I find this one comes out on top I'll definitely be using it on some personal websites so they just log into my account once I'm logged into my account I can grab a copy as you can see purchased this yesterday July the 6th download it once that's downloaded then I'll install it into WordPress ok so that's activated that we scroll down we'll see we've got dopey rocket at the bottom okay so till repeat rocket is all ready now let's just jump into the settings and take a quick look what I'm primarily gonna do is I'm gonna take this from someone that doesn't really know what they're doing so we're just gonna let the plugins kind of go with the basics you could tweak these and I might come back and take another look at some of these in further detail later on down the line so if you'd like to see more details about that we walk in for example and those kinds of things we take a look at configuring things a little bit more let me know in the comment section below as always okay so let's just close all these messages down a second so if we take a look at the settings page you can see what we have and from someone that doesn't really know what they're doing this could seem a little daunting with all the options but let's just take a look at what we can do with this so the rocket is now activated and already working for you so your website is loading faster okay let's just check this out so we'll just clear the cache to make sure that we started completely fresh and everything should now be done so let's go take a look at this now in GT metrics run those three tests and see where we are with the baseline figure with WP rocket installed see what kind of difference we get we'll let this run through now so all the same settings are in place server location what I'm using what browser I'm using and so on and let's take a look at where we end up with this once the results are in okay so that's kind of interesting these are the initial round of results this is the first time I run it as you can see our page school has come hasn't changed neither's have a yslow score they're both exactly the same as they were 71 and 89 what has changed though is the fully loaded time we've dropped over a second on average page size negligible difference you know hundred kilobytes let's put it and requests have dropped by one so what I do is I got to run this three more times to get a completely out of the box install get those results then we're going to take a look at some of the simple things we can do is you can see that the first thing that pops up is to serve scaled images that's the thing that's kind of killing our page speed score so take a look and tell if you rock it and see what options were inside there now this is basically a first look for me cuz I've never ever used WP Rock in my entire life so I'm going in in the same way as you maybe if you've never used this so you're getting my first reactions my experience of going in there and digging it and seeing what are available so let me say let me just run through this test two more times to get those initial results then we'll take a look at what we can tweak to see we can get better results from it okay so let's hop back in to the dashboard take a look at ODB rocket on what we can start to adjust so this is just taking the default options let's take a look at some of these options we have on the left hand side and see what I think the typical user could easily tweak to just make some alterations and potentially get some more performance caching let's take a look in there so you've got things like mobile cache if you have a separate application for mobile devices you could enable these separate cache most of us probably are going to be using that then you've got user cache it's a great way to have user specific or restricted content your website so if you've run into like a membership site you may want to enable caching for logged in WordPress users so they get the benefit of cached information when they're logged in now we can control things like the cache lifespan how long it's going to stay and so on file optimization and media is probably where we're going to do most of those tweaks so let's take a look at file optimization as you can see we've got things you'd normally expect things like minifying your HTML minifying your CSS files and so on to get rid of the whitespace and things that can just take up a little bit more space on those files it's worth bearing in mind that it's worth testing these out but you can find sometimes this can cause issues on the front end of your site if you minimize minify things especially javascript can have a little bit of an issue when minified so if you find your site has a problem chances are it's going to be these when you change them and what I would highly recommend when you're doing anything to do with caching and optimization is to try things out one at a time you know don't go and just change tons and tons of settings and then go back because if there is a problem you have no idea what's caused it so each one of these settings like for example file optimization will check the options inside here try those refresh the site and take a look before we move on to media for example so I'm gonna say I want to minify the HTML the CSS files you see this says this could break things so bear in mind that if you have a problem this could be the reason why so we'll say active I that activate that combine CSS files enable minify CSS files to select and what this means is if you have a theme that you see using sort of multiple CSS files and you could have something like CSS hero which would use a different CSS file and you could even be using your own custom CSS files this will group them into one minified file which should cut down on a few different things including the number of requests you get sent to your server and so on so we'll try that out we'll say yep let's do that and again activate combine it just tells us so it's nice to see it'll appear orchid is telling us look this could cause a problem so be careful you can also manually exclude files if you want to inside this area so that's quite cool to see if you know that there are files you do not want to minify you know CSS files or you don't want to combine you can choose which ones are not going to be affected and we've got finally optimize the CSS delivery LMS render block in CSS on your website for faster perceived load time again let's check that and see got four by critical CSS so before we move on to JavaScript let's save this and quickly take a test run to make sure that the site is still working as it should do so we'll save the changes on they will jump over there on to the site once that's saved and we'll take a look by refreshing this just to make sure that everything is loading as it should do now the other thing you probably want to do is come back into don't be rocket come back to your dashboard and we'll say clear the cache just to make sure whether we are looking at a live version of this site so you can see it says critical CS generation CSS generation is currently running two of eight page types completed refresh this to check it out so we have things going on in the background being compiled by WP rocket we have to kind of wait for those things before we're going to see the full-on results and we just have a couple of things in this so we'll refresh that and see where we are within the process there we go all eight have now been generated so now we'll just come in clear this cache one more time just to make sure and then we'll jump over to our food blog and we'll refresh this and if we find anything breaks we're gonna know where it's coming from so just looking at the homepage everything looks pretty good let's go and take a look at one of the other pages so we'll view the recipe page for example there we go everything is looking good there we'll take a look at an individual recipe and everything looks to be working exactly as it should do so those changes they haven't caused any impact upon what we've done with the website so we can come back into the review rocket go back into our cashing into a file optimization we know that the minified HTML and all those things are all working let's try now with the JavaScript files so you can see we've got removed jQuery and migrated so removes the jQuery migrated eliminates a Jas file and can improve load time minify your javascript files and load javascript deferred so we'll try these ones and again you get that are you sure you won't do this this could break things and this is why I say always make sure you go to the process of testing before you commit will say combine those and again we'll say yes to that and then the finally got load JavaScript deferred so we're just gonna try these up see what happens if we find something goes wrong we can just put things back if we find things slow down we can put things back so we'll save the changes on there we'll let that run through what it needs to do now to save things and again you can see it says and cache page is now being pre loaded refresh to see the progress so we'll refresh that and there we go it's still go through out the process so the final thing I want to do is come back into our dashboard clear our cache again just to make sure we're looking at the live version of this so pretty little complete everything is now cached so I'm gonna come back in go back to our home page just to check everything is working so I'm gonna force refresh this as we can see everything is looking fine on the front end of the site now obviously you'd spent a lot more time testing things just to make sure that your things like your filters and all those kinds of things have working so you can see we can test this out we're filtering down so that we know that the the JavaScript inside there in the Ajax everything is all working fine hit View recipe come and we can take a look at the recipes so everything appears to be working perfectly fine just come back into the repeat rocket we've done our cache we don't follow optimization let's take a quick look now at our media options I didn't say they can see we've got lazy load no lazy load is just basically going to only load images when you start to scroll down the page and get close to them so if you have a website that has a lot of images which is what we have with this particular website that could play a big part in getting better results so let's just say enable that for images I'm not gonna worry about iframes and videos because I'm not using any of those on this particular site emojis will say disable emojis we'll leave that disabled WordPress embeds this prevents others from embedding content from your site prevents you from embedding content from other non-white listed sites and removes JavaScript requests related to WordPress embed up to you if you want to use that test it see if it makes a difference okay so we'll save the changes on here we're going to do now is we're gonna just do the same again we're gonna come back to our dashboard clear our cache to go to our site just to make sure that everything is looking the way it should do so come back to our home page will force refresh this don't see you know you're gonna have some kind of browser caching going on as well so that is gonna have a little bit an impact upon how you see things on here we'll come back in and take a look at some of the final things I wanted look at preload would not gonna look at advanced database or CDN because at this point inside we're not using a CDN you could do and I would highly recommend that you do use a CDN but a lot of us may not even know how to do this kind of thing okay so we've done the media side of things let's just quickly come down to the image optimization and take a look what we have inside you as you can see then they want us to sort of grab image if I and we don't have that as available to us and I'm gonna keep that sort of side of things out of this just so we can sort of just stick with the plug-in itself and see what it's doing okay preload preload cache when you enable preload enthalpy rock it will generate the cache starting with the links on your homepage followed by the sitemaps you specify pre loading is automatically triggered when you add or update content and you can also be manually triggered from the admin bar so you can see this is automatically activated when you install the plug-in and you can say activate sitemap base cache pre loading so if you're using a sitemap which you should be especially if you use in some kind of SEO tools you can activate that and you see right math XML sitemap it knows we got ranked math inside there so we just check that option and you can again cite my soap reloading you expensive I what you want a preload DNS request will leave that exceed most users are gonna be like a dollar DNS is preload fonts so you can improve before smite helping browsers discover fonts in CSS files so you can see we can if you want to get this to preload the CSS files we leave that as it is though and let's just say we're gonna leave it there just make sure we save any changes we've made and then finally we're gonna come up once to save those changes come to our dashboard and clear our cache out completely okay so with those settings done saves and everything updated let's try GT metrics one more time again we're gonna do a three time test on this but I'll do this the first time on camera so you can see the results as we go through things now like I say I've only kind of gone through what I think the average user would feel comfortable testing out when they're configuring and tweaking something like WP rocket because I think you need to have a good understanding of quite a lot of the terminology is being used to test things out AB and there we go that's already quite a significant difference in quite a few of those different things so we've now jumped up from 71 and 89 on our page heat and why score why slow score respectively to 98 and 92 that's a pretty significant jump fully load time still sitting around the same thing but like I say this could be influenced by so many different factors and GT metrics isn't always the best indicator of this well at the time it's a case of testing things out across multiple different sort of testing sites like GT metrics Pingdom and all those kinds of things to get a real feel for it but you can see we have dropped over half a megabyte almost half a megabyte off our total page size by caching those images and our requests down from 64 to 21 and as you can see minimize redirects defer passing all these things are giving us decent results so what I do now is off-camera I'm going to make a note of these scores I'm gonna run this two more times so we can get that and mean rage with those updates in place with the rocket but initially the results do look pretty good with minimal tweaking okay so the WP rocket results are in looking pretty good like I say not too bad at all the thing that kind of is the biggest change in fact or the only real change in factor on the retest is the fully load time and that's kind of ranged between one point four seconds two seconds so if you take the highest of those the two seconds that's still pretty respectable of falls inside what is the recommended time scale for most places and I think if you were using a CDN alongside this you definitely benefit from even better results because then anybody's in a different country would have most of the key things like the image files the JavaScript files or sky things will be delivered from a CDN server close to them but I think don't be rocket US definitely come back with a good result and I think for many people this is something you could almost just click set forget so that's totally rockin next up we're going to take a look at Auto optimize so before we move on to Auto optimize let me just quickly explain what I'm doing between each of these installs I take a completely clean backup of this using Delta P vivid backup Pro so there's a clean copy prior to installing any cache in plugging includes the database includes everything for the site then between each one I'm gonna restore that back to the same point install the caching plug-in fresh into that fresh copy of the site so each time we're starting with the same setup so just so you know there's no sort of just wiping out the plug-in added another plug-in in there and so on when it kind of might get problems with cached files and things like that this is a completely clean copy each individual time I install this plug-in so there we go that's how we're gonna do it okay so I'm gonna do that behind the scenes so you don't have to sit here and watch me do it but I just wanted to explain that before we move on so I don't have to go through each time and you wonder what's going on behind the scenes so next on the list is auto optimize this time it's a free plug-in but one I have covered on the channel before and I've used various different times when I've got situations where paying for an optimization and cash plug-in isn't on the cards so let's take a look at Auto optimize and see exactly how that fares in our testing so let me did before we're gonna go into our plug-in section and add a new plug-in and from there we're just gonna search for this inside the dashboard because this is a nice free plugin so if you don't want to have any expense when you work with Auto optimizer say when you want to work with any kind of optimization caching tools Auto optimize is definitely one worth taking a look at I've used this quite successfully on a few different tutorials and a few different websites of my own it's definitely worth take a look at so let's install that once that's installed we'll then go and take a look once it's activated at the options we have available okay so let's activate that once that's activated we can take a look at the settings now I'm gonna do the same as I did with WP rocket I'm going to run a test with just Auto optimized installed with whatever default settings it comes out of the box with and also we'll then take a look at what we can tweak so let's just close all these nag messages down and then we're ready to go and take a look at the options you can see we have a new section at the top that says auto optimize tells us our cache size and all those kind of things and delete in the cache and so on so if we go in and Auto optimize you can see this is what we kind of start off with it's a much simpler kind of I can't say cleaner interface to WP rocket but it is definitely a lot less information but also not quite visually so nice okay so this is the starting point with pretty much nothing being done to it let's go over the GT metrics that's to our usual let's just go back to a fresh page we'll drop in the URL for the site and what we'll do then is we'll just take a look at testing it okay let's analyze this so again we do so on the same set in same server location all those kinds of things and this is one of those things that if you use GT metrics it is quite nice to just sign up for the free account let me just save the settings and every time you log in you're gonna be using all the same settings okay so we're getting closer to the final report and we'll see we start off with okay so this is where we are as you can see this is pretty much exactly what it was when we just had the clean stop site nothing else installed so it looks like Otto up to my straight at the box doesn't really do anything to your site it doesn't touch it at all so let's go into Auto optimize and let's just take a little look at what we have inside there so what I'll just I'm not gonna run the test on this because this is like I say doesn't seem to be doing anything whatsoever Steve's be Baxter stock what we had with a site to start off with okay so let's just say optimized JavaScript code once we do that you can see we have some similar options to what we had inside WP rocket now we've got aggregate J's file so this will aggregate all linked javascript files to have them loaded non render Block in if this is a if this option is off the individual chairs far as a remain in place but will be minified again make sure that you test these things that when you make changes test things to make sure that everything is working it doesn't cause a problem on your site so what do the says we did before we're going to just set the JavaScript options we'll test to make sure everything works then we'll move on to the next one so let's just say also aggregate inline JavaScript forced JavaScript ahead some load JavaScript early this could potentially fix some j/s errors but makes the J's render blocking we'll leave that off and we've got ad to try catch wrapping if your script breaks because of a J's area you might want to try this so if you do find you have issues with your site if you use these options then you can come back and try some of these alternatives and there is a certain amount of trauma error with whatever caching software you use because there's so many variables your site the tools use or the plugins you know the set of your server the type of server all those kind of things will play a part in how well these different tools will work okay so let's just say we're happy with that we're gonna say save the changes and empty the cache so we're starting off with a nice clean version come back go to a site we'll just refresh this page just make sure everything is working as it should do so everything looks good on there we'll take a look at one of the recipes to make sure everything is loading correctly on there and finally we come to our recipe section where we've got our filters and we'll just make sure that all our filters are all still working and there we go everything looks good so everything seems to be working fine so let's come back in now we're gonna try the CSS option so will enable optimize and CSS and again you see we have similar options what we had with the JavaScript aggregating inline CSS those kinds of things we was about things like generate data URLs for images to enable this option to include small background images in the CSF itself instead of separate image downloads so if you are using small graphics to create background textures and things this could definitely help speed up things it will cache those kind of things and put those into separate you into the CSS and so on okay inline and T for CSS in line above the full CSS well loading the main auto optimized CSS only after page load check the FAQ for more info this can be fully automated for different types of pages on the critical CSS tab we're gonna go like I say with what most of us that don't really get in there start messing with these things and have a great understanding of all these different technologies what most people will just check to see if it works okay inline CSS is easy most of CSS from being render blocking but it's jerry naka recommended because the size the HTML won't believe that as it is okay except again save cache and empty come back over will refresh this make sure that everything is looking good like I say I'm gonna fly to this quite quickly just so we can see that everything is in place and working as it should okay we're looking good on there that's okay happy with that let's come back over now to our HTML so optimizing HTML code keep HTML comments and able this if you want her to our comments remain in the page I don't really care it's not something I've set up myself so we can ignore that empty unsaved okay so what else do we have available CDN options we're not testing a CDN like I say that is something that I would highly recommend you do include a live site but for this example we're gonna keep this fairly straightforward cache info this just gives us some information about it now we've got miscellaneous options and I can't read through those experimental enable for or for for by Allah okay we will leave that as if we're gonna say this is some basic setup let's go and take a look at the images option right inside there we can say we can optimize and we can lazy load images lazy loading I would all recommend you do especially with quite image intensive sites optimize images say if you have a short picture can so you can say we can click to optimize that and this will then use the short pixel sort of set up automatic serve next-gen double images format in browser that it's up to you if you want to do it image optimization quality we have lossy lossy and lossless glossy is going to give us a sort of a middle-of-the-road kind of thing depends on the kind of image she's doing depends on the kind of site lossy is gonna give you the best compression and therefore the best saving in quality is a best saving in speed and so on glossy is kind of just gonna give a small amount of compression we'll leave it set that glossy for this example because we're dealing with images that are photographs with lots of details you can find if you've got too heavy on the compression they can start to look a little bit ropey so we're gonna leave those as they are and other than that we're just gonna leave it as it is to save the changes on there let that go and do its job like this probably run in the background to deal with those images for us critical CSS what do we have inside there okay so we need an API key so we're gonna leave that as it is and the extra section so this is where you kind of have just a few kind of fall outside the basic should we say google fonts do you want to leave them as is you wanna remove google fonts which obviously if you rely upon google fonts to your site you wouldn't want to do that and you have some other options and you leave them as they are remove the emojis yes please we'll query strings from static sources so this removes the query strings or more specifically the version parameter now this is something that you can see pop up quite a lot when it comes to your results inside GT matrix it's not generally recommended you use those so we're gonna say we want to remove those we're not gonna worry about pre connecting to third-party domains or pre-loaded specific requests or anything else we're just gonna say save the changes okay so we're ready now to run our first test so let's just drop the domain in there and let's hit analyze and again I'm going to do this on camera so you can see exactly what's going on you can see the results as they come in for the first I'm the same as I can now this is one of those areas again like I say there can be some testing just to make sure that everything works the way he expects and also you know to get the best results okay so that's not looking quite so good as what we saw when we were working with WP rocket you can see our page score has kind of improved a little bit our yslow is definitely improved our fully loaded time is three seconds which is quite high we have dropped a little bit in page size our requests have come down okay let me run that test now a couple more times so we can get those results and I can log those results into the spreadsheet test and we may find that because we hadn't loaded the page we hadn't cashed the images because you see you saying serve scales images I don't know we have to take a little look and see what we get on the next run-through but I'll run through those now and we'll come back and take a look okay so the initial set of results are in and we are still looking at around 2.8 to 3 seconds for the fully loaded time not brilliant so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back into the auto optimized option so we're going to go into the images section and this time we're gonna optimize these philosophy save our changes clear our cache out load the page for the first time and we're gonna take a look then to see if that makes a noticeable difference to the load time so let's come back over to our site will refresh this make sure that we have a clear cache there we go okay so I'm trying to quickly go and take a look at a couple of pages just so I could load things in and you can see where the images are flashing we are seeing that lazy load is in fact doing its job which is only loading things in when we need them on the page as opposed to being loaded in the background all the time okay so let's just take a look at this now we refresh station we should find the cache now shows us there we go just under seven megabytes so let's do the same again let's just run a simple test so we're gonna come up GT matrix drop in the URL hit analyze on there and let's see if setting those to be a heavier compression will make much of a change we should see a difference in the total page size I would have thought hopefully that will then reflect better values in the load time as well so there we go so we're seeing a little bit of an improvement the page speed is improved slightly the total page size is down probably about just over 100k fully loaded time not great if I'm honest there's a little bit of a time save but we're going to do I'll run through another two times so we can get that mean average with those settings but so far it'll be rocket is definitely coming out in front with the first two tests okay so with all the results back in one say is that Auto optimized in this example is not faring particularly well if honest it's actually increasing the load time to the site without any kind of caching on it so that's not a good thing but like I said your mileage definitely may vary and depend upon if you use in a CDN you should I can see better results now it is worth bearing in mind if you are going to use a CDN alongside sand like Auto optimize where you've got the CDN options for the base URL if you're using cloud Li you don't have an option for the base URL you have to do you have to change the name servers to point your domain to the cloud Flay servers it's not difficult it's pretty easy to do but you do have to do that and that's different to what you might find with other CDN so you could potentially use alongside this next on the list is nitro pack now nitro pack is a little different to some of the things you take a look good so far this is more of a global kind of service type thing that has a wordpress plugin associated with it so we can tap in and use the facilities and tools the nitro pack offers it is the most expensive service throughout the entire testing that we're going to do today so you'd have to weigh up the performance this may give you two the price that you have to pay and see if you think it's something that's viable for you so nitro pack is by far the most expensive option available and probably most users that are gonna be viewing this probably wouldn't be plumbing for this particular set of tools however it's in here because I think it's worth taking a look at if you have a site that's actually making money and you want it to be the fastest possible and using WordPress or basically any other kind of size I don't think this is WordPress specific this may be the option so we're going to they said anyway but bear in mind I've never used this this is the first time I've looked at it so I'm using the free option which gives me limited sort of traffic and I have to have a sort of graphic and things on the site but that's that's perfectly fine that allows me to at least test things out and come back with some feedback on how I think this phase now okay I go ahead I'm gonna install the nitro pack plugin once that's installed then we've got to link that through to the account so we'll activate this and once that's activated we'll take a look at what settings we have to play with so let's take a look at the settings option as you can see I'm on the free plan which gives me like I say pretty minimal amounts of like optimizations and things along those lines but anyway that should give us an idea so what we have we have the optimization mode the automated behavior and all those kinds of things so I literally have nothing configured inside here whatsoever so you can see we can further configure how nitro patch optimizations behave throughout the account using our account detail so we come back into our account we can take a look at various different things so this our site you can see is telling us it's optimized for mobile and also for desktop what else do we have we have a settings section inside here which we can come in and we can adjust our configuration so they put strong is the default straight out of the box kind of configuration but you can hop this up to ludicrous or you can go to manual but they do say with the ludicrous option there is the potential they to have issues with your site so it's worth bearing in mind that you could see some degraded performance awesome errors if you're not careful okay so we'll quickly just have a look through see what's in here and you can see things like cache in Ajax URLs caching CSS and so on but let's just take a quick spin first of all see if just the default settings make any difference so everything is all set up inside there okay we are looking good let's come over to our performance now they do say you should allow at least sort of five minutes before you start testing so with things like GT metrics so we're gonna do just that we're just gonna give this a few minutes before we run the test just to make sure that we give it a time to connect up to our site and do whatever nice - before we go in and take a look at tweakin and they also do recommend you should leave longer between any tweak settings before you test again we'll take a look at that as well okay we've given it a few minutes now we're ready to run our first performance tests using nitro pack with the defaults - at the box setting so we'll just drop in the URL and hit analyze on them like I say this is one of those areas that if you are making money off your site or you just intend to make money off of it you want the best-performing caching option to get the fastest site to minimize sort of traffic loss to minimize potential loss in sales so you know it comes down to the money that you're potentially gonna make to the money you spend on as you can see that's pretty impressive performance values across the page speed and the yslow score that's pretty good however you will see the fully load time is 1.6 seconds which still isn't amazingly quick compared to the straight out of the box with no plugins installed you know is this something to be said for a well optimized site to start off with however I say you look at the file size at one point four one megabytes not much of a saving less than sort of well less than 100k to be honest forty five requests as opposed to its initial 65 but you can't really deny the page performance scores and there should also fair pretty well inside Google ranking so it would be interesting to take a look at that as a separate thing in comparison to this just to see how that kind of phase okay so that's our initial scores looking pretty good I'm gonna give it a little bit of time in between I'm gonna run this test another two times and then we're going to take a look at what we can tweak and if we'll stick it up to that sort of ludicrous performer score and see what that brings to us and if everything works okay okay I've run all three tests and we range between one point six seconds and point nine seconds when it comes to performance for fully loaded time all three of those values are excellent and below that two-second average that you really want to avoid getting any higher than you will notice something though that we are by default using a CDN that's part of this particular service so you are benefitting from the CDN the size of things where's what the other ones we take a look at we're not really using any form of CDN so you can see it's user content delivery network yes it's definitely using that expires headers and so on so it is incredibly good straight out of the box with no tweaking whatsoever now before we finish with this let's take a look at just boosting this let's come back over to our options we're in strong mode let's just take this up to Ludacris and see what happens see if everything works or whether we just have a bit of a problem let's just come back up and actually we should be done that should be all we need to do with it I think I say I'm pretty new to this as well so you know purge our cache and we should be a completely clear site come back over let's just test our site to make sure it is still working ok homepage is looking good if we go and take a look at one of the recipes you can see everything is loading in perfectly fine on there and finally we'll jump up to the recipe section just test out our filters to make sure that's working ok so everything is looking like it's working let's come back over to GT metrics start a fresh set up on there and we'll analyze this now and see if we see any improvement over our initial findings like I say the initial findings were pretty impressive straight out the box anyway especially when it comes to the load time it is definitely sitting as one of the best across the entire board so far so that's pretty good to see ok well almost there there we go ok so we're seeing that will actually get a detrimental effect to it let's just run a retest just to make sure that the cache is all set up and working but as it is that's looking like it's gone back up to its initial setup prior to installing any kind of caching software so that's a little bit we are wasn't expecting that to happen but we'll run through a second test just to make sure that it wasn't something kind of weird going on and if it is we'll just put it back to what it was ok so we need to get my generator a report there we go so that looks a little better to make my ice we're still getting the same page score on the wife's low score but we are getting a better fully loaded time and we'd definitely seen a big difference in the page size and the number of requests we drop down all what 1 Meg on the total page size and we're about a third of the requests so that is definitely pretty impressive for sure come back over and what else do we have cache warm-up and HTML compression well in for a penny in for a pound as they say let's just pop on the HTML compression unless enable this so any real cash warm-up use 28 page optimizations would you like to continue yeah and we testing things that's we'll say yes we will please let's just see what that so enables a warm-up so we've taken up two Ludacris and we've done these other settings will purge our cache again now we may need to run this twice just in case we get some kind of weird glitchy performance we values that you saw the other time but let's come back here and let's just start a completely fresh test and we'll run this test now analyze this see we go from this so I'm kind of excited to see where this takes us if this gives us a better result again or whether we don't see such a great result at all but so far I'm definitely pretty impressed by nitro pack and I can understand why a lot of people are saying this is the one they think is gonna come out on top on the Facebook group so almost they okay generating reports and again one of those kind of weird results let's retest this just to see if it's just a cache it needs to refresh that cache needs to film that cache up you know it's kind of strange things that if nothing is being no-one's visiting the site the cache isn't being created and generated the faster not being auto optimized those kinds of things so we'll just take a little look and see where we go from here okay anything so not so great I'm kind of surprised at that if I'm brutally honest what I'll do is I'm gonna quickly run through this test three times I'm gonna go and just move around the site a couple times just to make sure that everything is being cached correctly okay so at one one or two final tests on there unless you can see performance is definitely not as good as it was before we enable those options so I take those back off run those three tests see what we get the mean average now with the tweaked version and this just goes to show that you have to test things out to see what gives you good results at any given point when you work with any caching software plug-in service or anything else so just bear that in mind test test test and just check those results and then repeat okay so let me just run through these tests now and see what we get at the results with the tweaked version so with a little bit more testing I can see the Nitro pack with the Lucas set in definitely comes back with a slightly better result total page size is definitely the big sort of saver here it is down by 2/3 requests again by 2/3 fully loaded time is not that dissimilar to the default setting with nitro pack so if you don't want to get into weak or you find you have some slight issues you're not gonna see a massively noticeable difference between the ludicrous setting with my setup at least and the normal sort of straight out of the box setting so either way it is still a fantastic result and overall is definitely coming out as one of the ones on top out of all the ones you've tested so far ok so there's time to reset our website one more time ok so next on the list is Swift performance we're going to take a look at this tested out and see how this fears against the first couple of plugins and services that we've tested out so far and see how it stacks up in both the price and also the feature set ok so once we install Swift performance we have a couple of options I'm gonna go for the Auto config first of all and then we'll take a look at what options we have to tweak afterwards so let's hit the auto config option let that run through any wizard so please note if you run the wizard it will reset current settings to the default that's perfectly fine we're on a completely clean setup anyway so let's start that and see what its gonna do so nice thing is this is going to go through and just check everything for us make sure everything is working exactly as it should do ok so there we go we'll hit next on there so your website is ready you can check advanced settings also to improve your results if you need any help blah blah so we've got optimized images with performance settings or Swift performance dashboard let's optimize the images because I think this is probably something that most people will probably think let's just do that at the bare minimum so it's optimize images and see what we have they okay so this is a feature requires a very purchase key so unfortunately we've got to go through and set things up on a valid purchase key so we'll just leave that as it is take a look at the dashboard what do we have inside there okay so this is giving us the basic info so we've done we've done the wizard let's just test it out and see what we get results wise could our dashboard do the same thing again when I drop in our domain hit analyze on there and see what our initial results come back from using swift performance okay so there's our initial results by using swift performance and not too bad at all we're getting a good page speed and yslow score our fully loaded time is pretty respectable without sub two seconds at 1.4 page size down by about 500k which again is a good substantial state saving and our request is down by probably around about 65 to 70 percent so that's pretty impressive straight out of the gate with no tweaking whatsoever so I'm quite surprised at how good that's actually come out so what I do now is like I said under the same as usual run through the three tests so we got a mean average and then we'll go take a look what we can tweak and see if we can just eat a little bit more out of this if there's any options in there that allow us to just fine tune and tweak just a little bit extra so and run through these tests and now I come back we'll move on take a look at what we can tweak okay if we jump into the settings you can see under our dashboard this gives us some basic information the number of pages the cache pages cache size threads and so on we've also got Swift performance at the top which we can do this like image optimizer database optimizer and so on we can run the setup wizard again if we wanted to made some changes we could potentially put that back to the beginning however if we come in to for example you can see we've got all the different pages listed there if we come into the settings section this will give us the basic simple overview and you can see we can just change this between simple and advanced views if we just take a look at advanced you can see it gives us a lot of additional options however like I say we're keeping this under the simple section for most people that would feel comfortable making some simple changes okay so what do we have we don't want anything of the general section and the tweaks you can see normal s static resources Gravatar cash customer HT access if we're using Google Analytics which lots of people will be you can choose to bypass that but most people are probably gonna come into the media and the optimization side of things so let's kind of take a look at media we've got the image optimizer we've got lossless slightly lossy moderate and aggressive and obviously depending upon the type of images you have and if you use in this image optimizer you can choose what you think is gonna work best I would be careful if you use it lots of photographs they are large in file size but too much compression like I said earlier can lead to just making them look really really poor so just be careful with that so you can see we've got help by the side of any one of these you see this can use a you can use a preset or fine-tuned image quality manually the other thing we have is keep original images so if you use in optimization and you are testing things out the last thing you'd want to do is to lose the original images and have no way of restoring them this just enables and is enabled by default to keep a backup copy of the original unedited uncompressed images that you've uploaded originally so I would generally recommend to keep the original images if you could have run any kind of optimization but bear in mind that is going to increase the space and storage you're gonna require on your site you can now generate web P images and again up to use.you if you want to and then you can choose to serve them if you want so you can come in and fine-tune tweak I'm gonna go through too much detail lazy load is definitely something we want on there and that's basically image your side of things if we come to optimization we've got things like enable server push blah blah blah optimized in the background so if you have a lot of optimization going on and you don't want to have a massive impact on your server special shared hosting you could say to optimize in the background and this will then just do it in the background for you minify HTML I kind of found that's a little hit and miss I do tend to find that sometimes I lose parts of my site if I enable that so for this example I'm going on to this test I wouldn't leave that and minified okay so you've got some other things there in forward to silly emojis and so on and styles and scripts and the caching we've got then things like general we can tweak things exceptions warm-up varnish if you want to use that if your server has that installed which I believe cloud weighs installs varnish as part of that which you can enable if you want to okay so what we're going to take a look at though is this image optimizer because I think this is probably one of the easiest ways of optimizing things so let's come into the image optimizer we'll leave that out that's fine and you can see this is telling us we currently have about three point six nine megabytes of images so what we can do is we can come down and we can select all the images so we can say optimize all images so you can say optimize all let that run through provided depend upon the settings you have configured you'll see a difference you can see this is cueing those images up and slowly going through those to do what it needs to do to compress those images and unset things out and this will then run through tell us how many images we've got how many been optimized the original size and the current size and how much we've actually saved from there so again it's one of those things that's quite useful you've also got delete original images so if you're happy with the optimizations that have been taking place and you're happy with the end results you could delete those original images if you didn't mind losing them okay so what I would say about Swift performance is that with the basic settings you don't really have a huge amount of control over what to change you have to start digging into the advanced views before you see some of the things that we're seeing in several of these other plugins so I'm gonna leave it as it is I'm never run me performer's tests any more there because I don't really feel like I've tweaked anything and the initial scores were we're pretty decent image optimizer saves us a little bit of file space you can see about about a hundred K if that so it's not gonna make a real noticeable difference on the low-speed so Swift performance straight out the box with no real tweaking still give pretty decent results not the best but still pretty decent so so we're performance it's up there with some of the decent contenders now we're moving on to WP super cache I'm interested to see how this one Fae is because this is again another one of those free options and a lot of times people don't have the cash to spend or splash out on caching and speeding up their website so I'm interested to kind of see how this one stacks up against the competition next on our list is WP super cache which is by these same developers behind WordPress itself so let's take a look what this gives us I've already gone ahead install this and as you can see by default it's turned off so all I'm going to do is enable our caching updated status provided everything else is in place we should be good to go with the basics now you see we've got easy advanced CDN content preload plugins and debug so we have a range of different options across the top for what we can do easy for example I'll just basically gives us what we are at the moment advanced we take a look on me this gives us a little bit more control and as you can see we've got cash delivery method we've got simple which is recommended for people who don't really know what they're doing so well an expert which will obviously open up more options so you can see expert caching requires changes to important server files that may require a manual intervention if enabled so you don't really know what to do it best to stay away from that one okay so we have a range of different things in it but I'm not going to change any of these or even look at them right now we're simply gonna go and test this on GT metrics so let's come back over do a clean test on there and let's just test this out so come on but just make sure I've got the address all ready and drop that into there and we'll run an analysis on this now I've never used WP super cache so I have no idea what to expect and whether it's one of those ones that is worth installing comparatively to things like that if you rocket or to optimize you know those kinds of things nitro pack and so on so what are we getting straight at the box not a huge amount if I'm brutally honest exactly the same as we had other than the fully loaded time compared to a completely clean site so nothing really going on too much inside this let's go back to the cache settings let's just take a little look at what we have okay so if we're back on the easy section so let's just take a look at test cache just give that a test run and see what we can where things that you were seeing this as I'm going through it so I don't really know too much about it everything comes back is okay we're all looking pretty good the cache is only one part of making yeah we know that okay so so look at the Advanced section see what we have inside you enable cache in for all visitors disable caching for logged in visitors let's just say we were enable it for everybody disable cache of visitors who have a cookie set in the browser don't cache pages with a get parameter compress pages so they serve more quickly to visitors you can I think you'd want to do that so we'll say yes to that did it to do enable dynamic caching mobile device support clear or cache files web post is published so look what has to go cache location we can leave that as it is and what we have done here this is just the expiry time and garbage collection for how long your cache actually stays inside the cache accepted filename and rejected yours do not catch the following page times mr quite nice to see that you can choose different kinds of page types to not cache you may have certain things that you want to have a live version every single time okay what do we have inside sure okay everything else I think is probably going to be still let's just take a look at updating this make sure that anything is saved just check everything is saved on it mmm okay CDN we don't have a CDN set up and like I say if you use in something like cloud play that's the one Telfair you have to do that on the name server level so we won't enable CDN support on this one so we want we are going to see a difference in quality content so what do we have inside you yeah pretty much there preload what we got inside there preload mode garbage collection disabled free load tags okay so in all honesty I'm not really blown away by what we have available inside you it seems to be very much a case of you have what you have and you have some control over things so because our site make sure everything is working as it should do and what we'll do is then we'll just run those three tests and see you what we get as a result I'm not feeling too optimistic about WP super cache this may be down to my lack of knowledge when it comes to using it that's perfectly you know sort of viable option okay let's just run those tests then so will retest and we let this run through for the first test and see what we get out of it I'm not gonna hold my breath too much the first set of results are in and as you can see is still saying the same thing again we've got the PageSpeed score said you were saying why slow of 89 percent the only thing that's an improvement over the version of the site with no caching installed is the fully load time which obviously is a positive thing so I'm gonna run this two more times make a note of all the different values that we have the results and I think we leave there will be super cache where it is based upon those quite poor results I can see if I've done something wrong missed something out by all means in the comment section let me know you've been an idiot kind of thing and you should have done this you should have an X Y and said to get good results out of this I'm perfectly open to those suggestions so by all means like I say let me know in the comments section if you think I just missed something out walk quickly breezing over this particular plug-in for caching okay so that's all the testing completed and I think it's safe to say that while you know don't be super cash didn't do an amazing job it did make a significant difference in the fully-loaded time taken the site with no kind of caching available on it from 2.3 to 2.5 seconds down to on average about 1.7 to 1.8 seconds so still sub 2 seconds so it hasn't done a bad job it just doesn't give you the same kind of control that you have when you're working with some of the other plugins that we've taken a look at so far so far in this testing so would I choose this one probably not but you've seen it it's been included so last on our list is WP optimizer and this is the premium version so again I've paid for this out of my own pocket to test this out and bring you the results so I'm interested to see how this stacks up because they do make some bold claims about how good this plug-in is I've seen several different people say it is a plug-in worth checking out so I'm really interested to see how this stacks up against the competition for the free versions the services and also the paid options so let's take a look at WP optimizer premium okay so just purchased a copy of WP optimized set my account app and everything else I've also gone ahead install the plug-in and activated it so we are ready to go if we take a look at the options for this so there's still if you optimize let's just hit the optimize settings I say okay optimize that so what we have loading data so we've got optimizations tables and settings we can if we want to run through all the optimizations some of these have warnings to say in items mark with the icon perform more intensive database operations in very rare cases if you database server happen to crash or be forcibly powered down at the same time as the optimization operation was running data will be corrupted you may wish to run a backup before optimizing well I've got a backup in place already so let's just say let's hit all those run all selected optimizations and we'll find out I suppose if this decides to crash during the optimization process but we'll let this run through its optimizations and hopefully everything will work perfectly fine as you can see being part of the updraft plus software company we could if we had updraft plus installed take a backup before doing this so you can see they're definitely linking things together to you know make sure that you have all the software installed okay there's no scheduled optimization scheduled cleaning and disabled okay let's just did that even run let's just run those again let's just check to see if everything worked okay and I have no idea let's just let this run through and see what it's going to do okay this may take a little longer now it looks like it is actually running this time so we'll let that run through and once it's finished we'll come back and take a quick look and what this kind of comes back with okay so there we are let's run that GT metrics performance test and see what kind of results we get from it so copy that GT metrics and analyze now I will say straight out the box that doesn't seem that intuitive to see exactly what you need to do it says optimize and then there's just a pile of check boxes that once you check them and you run that optimization it just leaves them checked and doesn't really say much about it again it could totally be me not understanding what's going on with it because I am literally going through this at the same time as you're seeing it so across the board we see an exactly the same thing with fully loaded time being even higher than it was with just a clean site so before I run this in any real kind of way let's just take a look let's come over to the images then for example show compression meta box what we want to do compress images uncompressed images so okay so let's just say prioritize retention of details because some Advanced Options and we can choose what we want to use preserve exit date and not to bother back up original files we should say yes you want to do that okay so I'm definitely thinking this is not the most intuitive setup whatsoever compared to some of the other options we have okay mark all the images is uncompressed you really want to mark them no I don't yeah I don't really know what's going on how to use the image compression feature unused images and sizes this action is reversible if you don't have a backup so we don't want to delete anything from there lazy load images hyphens and videos yes we'll save the settings on there we do want a lazy load let's take a look at our cache options enable page caching absolutely otherwise we're not ready to get much you said - this generates separate files for mobile no serve cache pages - logged in users entirely up to you you want to go ahead or not save all changes on there preload what we have this actual trigger tell if your device to cache the site by visiting pages to preload them yet let's run that activate schedule cache pre-loading the schedule preload it will run automatically in your chosen time period so as you can set up how often you want this to run in the background for you okay so 216 URLs pre-loaded let that finish off with those all 16 nice thing is the site isn't massive there's only 16 pages as you can see that's front-facing on there so that's not too bad well either okay one more page to go there we go okay advanced settings exclude from caching and over those that's fine gzip compression yet muster say that's enabled static file headers okay and minify do we want to enable minify yeah let's enable that so we can see we can process the HTML the JavaScript and the CSS so that's that's all you have inside there you can come into the settings and we can see we do have some extra options so contain each individual files on block enable if trying to isolate a javascript error okay okay nothing too untoward in there say a CSS is pretty much the same thing as well fonts settings okay advanced okay we let those we'll save those we'll join under the site like I say I do get some issues sometimes with HTML minification so we'll refresh the page just to check everything is working okay one of the areas to tend to find us a bit quirky as you can see the filters disappear so we come back into this come back into a minify status and we'll uncheck the minify HTML we set the minified files and that should automatically settings for us let's come back to this refresh our page and as you can see they are back so you can see sometimes you do get issues and that's the kind of issue you could come across and that's why it's worthwhile sitting there testing your entire site just to make sure that everything is working the way you expect okay so we'll say we're happy with most of the things on there we won't worry about the settings we'll take a look at that separately so let's come back over to this now and we'll run a fresh test on there so that's just copy this URL just to make sure I've got that and see if this now makes any real noticeable difference I will say though I'm not overly impressed with WP optimized yes I pre sit down take more time to go through and see exactly what's going on and how it all works but stare at the box it certainly doesn't give great results and it certainly isn't doesn't even polish to me it doesn't even polish to some of the other ones but great results from a little bit of tweaking you can see we've definitely improved those results and we're getting probably close to don't if you rock it in statistics yeah look at that we aren't far off that if you rock it fully loaded time is a little lower in some cases file size and requests is around about the same so that's a good starting point but like I say you did have to get in and tweak something so straight up the box it's not gonna give you results you're gonna be blown away by it if you don't really know what you're doing with this you could get yourself into a little bit of frustration a little bit of hot water so my initial impressions could do better we'll give it a C+ okay so I'm gonna run through this two more times come back with the results and see where we are well that's the results for Donna P optimized in it gives decent results to cover say once you get in there and you tweak a little bit you can get some good results out of it and it's ranging between 1.9 seconds of 1.3 seconds what it is kind of saying though is that it's coming down underneath that two-second rule and I think that's the thing to take away from most of the plug as we take a look at today is that they do all come in and two seconds of a low time except for Auto optimize which was pretty poor in this respect it was ranging for over 2.7 to three-second so Auto optimized in this example not really in the running okay so that's all those tested the results are in let's take a quick look at those results and were you surprised by any of these were you kind of thinking well I thought that if you rocket was gonna be the best or nitro packs gonna be the best or one of the free options let me know what you thought was going to be the number one and if you've been surprised by these results for me I would say the Nitro pack is a great plug-in or great service I should say but unless you're making money of your website all you really need to eke out every last drop from just a cashing a plug-in then I would say nitro pack is gonna be the one for you however in this situation I would probably opt for WP optimized it isn't far behind nitro pack and it is considerably cheaper WP rocket is also another one that's worth taking a look at and like I say with some tweaking and setting things up on server level and making sure that everything is optimized not just like I said the top of the video slapping on a caching again and expecting it to work miracles I think this is definitely one worth checking out as always though let me know your feedback your results that you've had if you tested these out and your opinions on everything about cover today in that comment section below because I love getting your feedback and seeing what you think as always all of the applicable links for everything I've covered and video or in the description below - be impor see this has been wptouch until next time take care

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 18,970

Keywords: WPTuts, wordpress cache plugin, wordpress cache plugin 2020, best wordpress cache plugin, best wordpress cache plugin 2020, wp fastest cache plugin, cache wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress speed, best wordpress plugins, speed up wordpress plugin, wp cache, wp fastest cache, WP Rocket, wp optimize plugin, nitropack wordpress, nitropack vs wp rocket, speed up wordpress, wordpress optimization, speed up your wordpress website

Id: dipB7l3tcxA

Length: 67min 4sec (4024 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020