Why?
With the use of mobile devices, website speed has become increasingly important. These days, visitors expect websites to load within two seconds or less. Anything more and they are likely to push the back button on their browser. One of the most effective ways to make a website load faster is to use caching. WordPress users who want to implement this technology can choose from a number of plugins.

But what is caching?

The term caching means temporarily storing data. Web browsers constantly save data from websites like images, files and pages on your hard drive. That way, when you go back to the same site, they don’t need to load everything from the start but can use what they already have. As a consequence, websites appear faster on your screen. To understand what WordPress caching plugins do, you first need to understand that the majority of websites are HTML documents (and CSS/JavaScript, of course, but HTML is the basis). WordPress, however, consists mainly of PHP.

When someone request to see your WordPress site, its HTML version is dynamically created from the PHP scripts found inside the files on your server. Naturally, that takes time and processing power.To speed up the process, caching plugins create and save HTML versions of your pages beforehand and serve them to browsers directly. That way, they don’t have to build the pages from scratch every time.

Okay I understand that, but how can I choose the right cache plugin for my website?
It´s not easy to tell, probably your first idea is to search on Google for something like “best wordpress cache plugin“. You get thousands of results and a lot of comparisons tests. Most of these “tests” are actually websites with advertisements. If you take a closer look to these “tests” likely all mentioned plugins have a direct link to the website of the author, but with a referal. In other words, they earn (affliate) commission from the plugin author. Why should they write a honest article?

The only way to make the right choice, is to test multiple cache plugins yourself. Is it easy to setup? Are there any conflicts? Is the speed of your website increasing? Does everything works correctly. Most cache plugins creates some conflicts if you use all (pro) settings. Therefore good support from the author or other users is essential. If you only go with basic settings that already is a great start to compare the outcome of the cache plugins.

Free or paid?
Plugins come in free and paid (or premium) forms. The decision to go with a free or a paid one varies from case to case. However, choosing the right plugin is very important. Also keep in mind that plugins should solve a specific problem or provide an essential function. As mentioned before, reliable support is essential, which in most cases you only get with paid plans.

Now you understand how it works, I tested 2 poplulair Cache Plugins; WP Rocket & Swift Performance.
Read further about the test and the outcome….