Every day, it seems there is more and more competition for people’s time. Be it the internet, movies, TV, video games or streaming, these days, in order for your site to be successful and gain traction, you not only need to have an interesting and engaging website, but you also need to make sure it is fully optimized and loads quickly. 

Of course, as anyone that has set up and run a website will know, getting visitors to visit your website is one thing, but getting them to stay for an extended period is quite another. 

You may get visitors to your websites for any number of reasons, but they will only stay and return again in the future if it is efficient and professional. The most simple and obvious example of this is how long it takes for your site to fully load. New research by Google has found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds. Page speed is a direct ranking factor, a fact known even better since Google’s Algorithm Speed Update. However, speed can also affect rankings indirectly, by increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time. Typically, the greater the speed of your website, the better your ranking will be. 

Having established the importance of page speed in trying to get your WordPress site fully optimized and on the first page of Google, which website performance-boosting plugin should you use? WP-Optimize and Autoptimize are two of the most popular plugins available for WordPress. In this blog we will look at both of them, evaluate performance and which one you should install

Website performance-boosting plugins

Your website should be performing to optimal speed if it hopes to attract visitors that will stay, interact and return in the future. Although you may have a great product and a modern and stylish design, it is not enough to just expect these factors to bring your success on their own. To help, you need to install performance-boosting plugins to ‘speed’ things along.. 

Your website has a reserved storage space called a ‘cache system’, and it’s specifically cut out for storing temporary data. Caching solutions will store static versions of your website in a cache. This allows WordPress to skip running heavier PHP scripts every time your site loads. This caching process helps to improve WordPress speed and performance and the overall user experience. This cache collects images, text, and other data when a visitor comes to your page for the first time. The essence of this is to give your site enough room to load faster and generally perfume more efficiently. 

But for your cache system to perform well, it has to have a decent CPU and RAM. But however great they are, they will soon run out with increasing traffic, leaving the site to render slowly. This is where performance-boosting plugins, such as WP-Optimize and Autoptimize help. They work round the clock to improve the efficiency and overall performance of your site.  

WP-Optimize

As the leading all-in-one plugin, WP-Optimize cleans your site’s database, compresses the images and caches the website. At the time of writing, WP-Optimize has more than a million active installations and a 5-star rating from hundreds of thousands of users on WP.org. WP-Optimize has become the plugin of choice for anyone that is looking to keep their WordPress site fast and efficient. 

Autoptimize

Autoptimize is another popular plugin for optimizing your WordPress website. Like WP-Optimize it works by aggregation and caching scripts and styles. Autoptimize will input CSS into the page head by default, as well as inline critical CSS. It will then defer the already aggregated full CSS, move the scripts to the footer and minify HTML. 

It features Google Fonts and image optimization, including Lazy Load with support for Web and AVIF formats. Autoptimize can be a good plugin to install if you want to improve your website’s performance. Like WP-Optimize, Autoptimize also has more than 1 million active Installations but has a lower 4.5 star rating. 

Comparison of WP-Optimize and Autoptimize (tabulated) 

WP-Optimize and Autoptimize: Which is a better optimization plugin?

With both plugins having over a million active installs and a high star rating, the dilemma for every website owner is which plugin is more suitable for speeding up a website’s load time and improving the overall performance. As can be seen in the above chart, WP-Optimize has more features and tools and is clearly the better performance-boosting plugin.

WP-Optimize offers more value 

One thing WP-Optimize and Autoptimize have in common is that they both offer a free version of their popular plugin and optimizations functions. But both plugins are not created equal. Feedback from users who have used and compared the two plugins have shown that WP-Optimize is the superior of the two, both in features and in functions. 

WP-Optimize has a backup feature

WP-Optimize plugin comes combined with the UpdraftPlus backup service; the most trusted and biggest backup backup plugin in the world. By using WP-Optimize and UpdraftPlus, you can be rest assured that essential files, such as original high-resolution images on your WordPress site, are kept safe. The backup and restore functions for UpdraftPlus are so seamlessly built-in that they can be operated by just the press of one button – restoring your site or files to their previous state. Autoptimize lacks this feature and does not offer any kind of backup or restore service. So if you make a mistake while optimizing your site with Autoptimize, then you will be stuck with the changes you have made.

Image compression feature: Which is best?

Like WP-Optimize, Autoptimize has an image compression feature built into the plugin. But it is recommended that you disable the feature on Autoptimize, as it does not appear to function optimally. Even Autoptimize advise that users use a third-party plugin like Imagify to compress your images. The image optimization feature in WP-Optimize is a cutting edge and leading image optimization platform that works well and it’s easily the best in the WordPress market. One of the best ways you can improve the speed of your site via WP-Optimize is by optimizing your images. This process, which is commonly known as ‘smush’ or ‘smushing’ allows users to optimize, compress and resize all the images on a website, potentially saving many MB per image and improving loading speeds. This feature is available on both the free and premium versions of WP-Optimize.

WP-Optimize is easy to use

After installation, both WP-Optimize and Autoptimize still require some fairly simple and straightforward ticks within the plugin options to fully set them up. However, WP-Optimize is much more straightforward and easier to set up for both WordPress novices and experts. Users may find that Autoptimize is a bit more complex and that you may need some technical know-how to make the kind of changes that are more easily identifiable in WP-Optimize.

Autoptimize has minify-related issues

Many users have sent and reported feedback in which they complained about running into problems when they set Autoptimize to minify CSS and JS. The recommended solution is to exclude CSS and JS files when trying to minify files. This is obviously not ideal and limits the kind of optimization that a user can perform on their site. WP-Optimize does not have this problem. Users can minify CSS and JS on WP-Optimize to their heart’s content! This is just another example of why WP-Optimize is superior. 

Conclusion

If you have read the above blog, then you will have already figured out for yourself exactly which plugin is the best and why. If you want to improve any aspect of your site and improve its speed and performance, then WP-Optimize is the easy favorite for all the reasons listed in this article.

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More than 40% of your website visitors will close your site and leave if it takes over three seconds for your website to fully load. This phenomenon becomes more relevant as technology continues to advance with other devices vying for your attention, causing the global attention span to decrease. By now it should come as no surprise that site speed is crucial to the success and usability of your site and influences your website’s search engine rankings. Knowing this, if you run a WordPress based site, a common dilemma at this point will be ‘what website performance boosting and optimization plugin should I use?’ To answer that, we will compare and contrast two of the most popular optimization plugins: WP-Optimize and WP Rocket.  

What’s an optimization plugin?

Every website has a dedicated storage space reserved for keeping temporary data to ensure your WordPress website loads faster and generally performs more efficiently. This storage space is called a ‘cache’. When your website is opened for the first time it collects files, images, text and other necessary information about your device. It’s this data from the first visit that ensures your website loads faster on subsequent visits. 

Your cache system will require decent levels of RAM and CPU to properly carry out this function. But no matter how good they both are, increasing traffic will soon consume it, causing the page to render slower. This is where performance-boosting plugins come in. They are able to cache your WordPress site, clean your database and compress your images. This helps to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your WordPress site.

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is an all-in-one optimization plugin that cleans your database, compresses images and caches your website. Put all of these functions together and you get what the name implies, a well-optimized WordPress website, performing seamlessly and efficiently. 

WP-Optimize currently has over a million active installations. If you are serious about keeping your WordPress website in the best shape and providing a high-end user experience, you have to install WP-Optimize for your website.  

WP Rocket

WP Rocket is another optimization plugin that allows you to speed up your website in a few steps. It ranks among the most functional WordPress website performance plugins in the world. Like most optimization plugins (including WP-Optimize), WP Rocket can help to cut down your load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores. 

Comparison of WP-Optimize and WP Rocket features

Why is WP-Optimize a better caching plugin than WP Rocket?

WP-Optimize has a free version

You can install WP-Optimize on your WordPress website and start using it for free without any hidden charges. You get instant access to several features including database optimization, caching and image compression. WP Rocket does not offer a free version and as such, all of its features come at a premium. Buying a premium product without being able to test out it’s features and functionality can be an expensive and risky endeavor. With WP-Optimize, you can test out many of the major features and get a better feel for how the plugin can improve your site, without having to spend your hard earned money first. 

WP-Optimize is a better Premium option

While prices are subject to change over time, the general pricing levels of these two plugins show a significant difference of price and number of websites the plugin can be used on. While WP-Optimize not only offers a free version of it’s plugin, it also has a premium version that gives access to additional features, including logging, lazy load, multisite support and top-notch optimization scheduling. 

The premium version of WP-Optimize is more affordable than WP Rocket and will let you install it on more websites compared to WP Rocket.  

WP-Optimize

WP Rocket

WP-Optimize comes with an image compression feature

In the bid to increase website speed and facilitate large file savings, WP-Optimize offers both Lossy and Lossless image optimization. Large, uncompressed images can be one of the leading factors on why a site could take so long to load. As an additional feature, you can also backup your original high-resolution image files, in case you need them in the future. WP Rocket does not come with a built-in image compression feature. You would have to install Imagify, a third-party plugin, to compress your images. 

WP-Optimize is integrated with UpdraftPlus backup

WP-Optimize uses UpdraftPlus to back up your site. UpdraftPlus is the world’s leading backup plugin and is an essential plugin to install in order to safeguard your files. The integration is so seamless that the backup and restore functions are automatic and super-convenient. WP Rocket does not have this option, which is an especially necessary and crucial feature when making any changes to your site.

WP-Optimize is more effective for page caching

Page caching gives your WordPress website the capacity to generate more than just a set of files for separate visits from different devices – This feature allows for an overall better website performance, and while both WP-Optimize and WP Rocket offer this feature, WP-Optimize is more effective in delivering noticeable results. 

Conclusion

As you have learned from this blog, both plugins will do a good job in optimizing your website. However WP-Optimize is the more effective option and can deliver better results. The addition of a free version of the WP-Optimize plugin also allows the user to experience and test out the basic features within the plugin, without having to make an expensive purchase. If you are looking to speed up your site, reduce image size and find the best caching option available, WP-Optimize is the plugin for you. Download and install it today!

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WordPress is the largest website-hosting platform in the world. With that comes a lot of eyes and expectations. For your WordPress website to function optimally with little or no issues, you will need to install appropriate plugins. Some examples of essential plugins include a backup plugin, security plugin, and cache plugin. It is highly recommended that you install a cache plugin, as this plugin is essential to the overall speed and functionality of the website. 

For old and new WordPress users who want to speed up their WordPress site, two popular cache plugins are often at the top of any list; WP-Optimize and WP Fastest Cache. But which one is the more effective cache plugin? As you will read in this blog, both WP-Optimize and WP Fastest Cache are great plugins that are used and recommended by people all over the world. But as you would expect, not all cache plugins are created equal. While there are premium version of both plugins available with lots of additional extra features and tools, this blog will compare the features available via the free versions. 

What is a cache system?

Essentially, a cache system is the rendered WordPress page that requires PHP and MySQL. The system will also need good RAM and CPU settings. However good the RAM and CPU may be, you could find that as your visitor numbers increase, users will need and consume larger and larger amounts. As a consequence of this, your pages/site will begin to render more slowly. This can be bad news for your site as Google ranks the speed of your site as one of the primary factors in its search ranking algorithm. 

As such it is highly recommended that you use a cache plugin to help improve the load time of your page – which can help improve your Google SEO ranking as a result. 

WP-Optimize

WP-Optimize is simply outstanding in how it works. The plugin is an all-in-one platform that cam perform the following tasks quickly and easily:

• Database cleaning
• Site caching
• CSS and JS minification
• Image compression

Having racked up more than one million active installations, WP-Optimize is a powerful, successful and popular plugin you should install to keep your website in the best possible shape. 

WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache is also a highly popular WordPress caching plugin that is mostly known for its simplicity. Although it also has a free version available for download, the major features most users may require – such as Mobile Cache, Widget Cache, Minify HTML Plus, Minify CSS Plus, Minify JS, Combine JS Plus, Defer Javascript, Optimize Images, Convert WebP, Database Cleanup, Google Fonts Async, and Lazy Load are only available in the premium version. 

The free version is fine to use if you just want to make some quick gains in the loading times for your WordPress site. However, as someone that wants to fully optimize your site, ‘fine’ isn’t the greatest accolade when other plugins can do so much more.

WP-Optimize and WP Fastest Cache: Feature comparison

Why is WP-Optimize a better overall caching plugin than WP Fastest Cache?

It offers more features

WP-Optimize offers more features for free. Everything from the compression of large images, to database cleaning, to site caching, is accessible on your WordPress site once you install WP-Optimize. WP Fastest Cache only provides a very limited list of features and provides the more useful and important features via it’s premium plugin. 

WP-Optimize comes with a database optimization feature

Redundant website content, including trash comments and discarded drafts are wiped clean to help keep things faster and more smoothly. WP Fastest Cache does not offer this feature via it’s free version.  

WP-Optimize compresses large websites images

With the free version of the WP-Optimize plugin, you can determine the final sizes and format of your images. All you have to do is set it to your preferred settings. WP Fastest Cache only has this feature available in its premium version. 

WP Optimize has a great customer support

With more than one million global users and thousands of 5-star ratings, WP-Optimize is committed to bringing you the best user experience possible.

Conclusion 

We encourage users to use both WP-Optimize and WP Fastest cache and evaluate the relative performance of both. While both plugins are extremely popular and both have their supporters and detractors, WP-Optimize offers a far wider range of important features that combined can help make your site run faster. This in turn can help improve your SEO score, which can lead to a higher Google ranking, more success and more interactions with your visitors.

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In this blog, we will discuss WordPress caching; what it does – and how it improves the performance and speed of your website. 

What is Caching? 

To understand WordPress caching, you first have to understand the concept of caching. Caching refers to the process of storing data in temporary folders where they are easily accessible. It’s primary aim is to reduce processing time and make information available as quickly as possible. 

This is especially important in WordPress websites. WordPress websites are dynamic by default, which means that each time a user visits your site, WordPress goes through a series of steps to generate information from your database to show to the visitor. 

The benefit of this process is that the user gets a somewhat customized experience, since the pages are generated specifically for them. This benefit has the drawbacks that occur as a result of the long processing time, which can make the website slower.

When it comes to caching specifically in WordPress, it works by following the process of temporarily storing the dynamically generated files of frequently visited pages on your website as static files for easy recollection and use. Caching reduces the demand on your web server to continuously generate dynamic content. This means that when a user visits a page, the page shown to the user is stored exactly how it appeared the last time they visited, so the next time that page is requested, there’s no need for WordPress to generate a new page. It just presents the previously generated page, at a rate that is 3-5 times faster.

There are two types of content available on web pages:

• Static files: As the name implies, static files refer to the types of content that do not change. These types of files include images, javascript files, css stylesheets, and HTML pages. Static content remains the same regardless of the user and is created long before they are needed.
• Dynamic files: Dynamic content is created at the point of request, specifically for the user. This type of content is created based on the user’s location, device and time of request.

WordPress caching is the process of storing these dynamic files as static files, thereby increasing the speed and performance of your website. 

There are two basic types of caching – Client-side and server-side. 

Client-side Caching 

Client-side caching occurs when the temporary caching files are stored on the end user’s device. Modern browsers have the benefit of having smart coding that aims to reduce redundancies by saving static files for future use. 

As a result, when users open a web-page, the browser starts downloading static files such as images, HTML pages and other multimedia content. Their browser saves all these files so it doesn’t have to re-download them every time you visit the site in the future. 

While this helps with the speed of your browsing, it is recommended that you clean up your cache data once in a while so the files don’t become too bulky and reduce the performance of your browser.

Server-side Caching 

Server side caching refers to the caching protocol employed by your WordPress server to save temporary files. There are four possible protocols for WordPress Caching; 

• Page caching 
• OPcode caching 
• Object caching 
• CDN Caching 

Page Caching 

Page caching occurs when your caching plugin – like WP-Optimise – saves the dynamically generated HTML files on your server’s hard disk (RAM) after the first time it is loaded. Whenever there is another request for that page, your server produces the previously generated data.

OPcode Caching 

When a PHP file is loaded on the website, OPcode caching saves the compiled PHP code. For a PHP code to execute, it must be generated and compiled by the PHP compiler. OPcode caching saves the initially generated code on the server’s RAM, to save time upon subsequent requests. 

Object Caching 

Object based caching saves database queries after the first time they are requested. This way, it reduces PHP execution time and load time when the query is requested again. Since WordPress is a content management system that is reliant on databases, object caching seeks to reduce the load on the database and reproduce previously loaded content faster. This is crucial for high traffic websites. So crucial that WordPress has its own internal caching system that can be enhanced with a third party tool.

CDN Caching 

CDN (content delivery network) caching refers to the process of storing web content in proxy servers that are much closer to the end user. By using proxy servers, CDN caching helps your website to deliver content much faster. 

How does WordPress Caching improve your WordPress site speed and performance?

WordPress caching increases the speed of your website in three primary ways

Moves files to “recent memory”

You may be aware that computers and computer systems are built to mimic the brain. Caching is a prime example of that. 

When you try to remember an event from your childhood, it takes a while before you fully recollect the details. However, if you try to remember that same event days later, you remember the details almost at once. This is because your brain moved the event to a recent memory. It may surprise you to learn that you are not remembering the event, but you are in fact remembering the last time you remembered the event. 

Caching adopts this same principle by storing previously loaded web elements in a “recent folder.” As a result, your web pages load faster when they are requested. 

Saves files closer to the end user

Another way caching increases the speed of your website is by delivering content that is closer to the user; either from a server close by or from the user’s hard disk. This is a combination of client-side and server-side caching. 

Compress images 

Caching plugins like WP-Optimize give you the option of compressing your images. Bulky images take more time to load which can slow down the overall speed of your website. With cache plugins, you can manually or automatically compress images to reduce load time.  

How Caching boosts performance of your WordPress website 

Caching plugins don’t only increase your load speed, but they reduce the workload on your server. The following are the ways by which caching improves your website’s performance

Improves user experience 

Consumer attention span reduced from 12 seconds to 8 seconds in just 16 years from 2000 to 2016. There’s an explanation for this; technological advancements, intense competition and over stimulation of the mind from smart devices are the most significant culprits. 

This now means that you have only a few seconds to make an impression or lose the user to a potential competitor. Research suggests that slow websites are a huge turnoff to modern day internet users. 

There is also a correlation between higher bounce rates and slower pages, which means the longer it takes your page to load, the higher your bounce rate. The ideal page load time is under 2 seconds. A load time beyond 3 seconds can increase page abandonment rate by up to 87%.  

Improves ranking 

Website speed is a performance and ranking factor for search engines. In recent times, search engines like Google have begun to penalize slow websites. Websites with longer page load times are eventually pushed farther down the pecking order and replaced by faster websites. 

Google prioritizes user experience as a ranking factor and site speed is a crucial aspect of the UX. When users get disappointing experiences from the websites search engines direct them to, it reflects poorly on the search engine. Users are then less likely to trust the search engine results if that trend continues. 

Boosts content availability 

Several factors affect whether or not your website will load for a user. Frequent network interruptions or network congestion for example, are two of those factors. Since WordPress dynamically generates content for the user, this could greatly affect the performance of your website for that user. 

Caching solves this problem by providing an already generated page for the end user. This way, you won’t lose a potential or active customer to a poor network connection.

Cleans your database 

Caching plugins like WP-Optimize work to clean your database by de-fragmenting MySQL tables and clearing data like trashed comments, expired transient options, pingbacks, etc. This process is important because without it, your website’s performance and speed reduces overtime. 

Conclusion

Chances are that you may never get to notice how your website interacts with every end user. You can’t tell what happens when people try to access your website from halfway across the world. But what you can do is ensure that your WordPress site’s performance and speed are optimal at all times. With WordPress caching, you don’t have to lose sleep worrying about all that. Install a reputable plugin like WP-Optimize, and buy yourself some time to focus on other aspects of your business. 

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