January 12, 2012 
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Today’s question comes to us from an anonymous reader who’s confused about the best caching solution for WordPress.
Which plugin should I use for caching on my WordPress site?
What’s the difference between W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache? Is one better than the other? If so, why?
What are your thoughts? Do you use either of these plugins on your WordPress site? Or would you recommend a different caching solution? Please leave a comment below this article and let us know what you think.
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We use WP Super Cache for all of our WordPress websites. Over the years, this has proven to be the best caching plugin for WordPress in our applications.
We choose WP Super Cache because it is “super” easy to use. And it can save huge amounts of time and resources, by exponentially increasing website load speeds and decreasing server resources when properly configured.
And there are a variety of other plugins that work well with WP Super Cache to enhance website performance even further (WP Minify, CDN Sync Tool, Google Libraries, etc).
W3 Total Cache is a great alternative, but not so user friendly especially for the average WordPress user. It can do all the same things as WP Super Cache, and maybe more, but it takes more knowledge and server expertise to setup/configure properly. And some changes maybe be required server-side, and additional server applications installed, to run W3 Total Cache properly. And the performance, per additional work required to setup properly, is very similar to that which WP Super Cache can provide.
So for the average WordPress site, and user, I’d recommend using WP Super Cache to enhance your WordPress website’s performance. If your WordPress website is getting 100,000+ site visitors per month, then you may want to look into using W3 Total Cache. Only at this point and above, will W3 Total Cache maybe outperform WP Super Cache.
Hope this helps!!
Nice response! Thanks for the insight.
Cheers
Tim
I don’t use either of them any more. They just seemed to cause problems and were difficult to configure.
Now I use Quick Cache by Websharks. (not the most promising of names, I must admit, but the plugin is available from the WordPress directory)
There are no settings that need to be configured (although experienced users can do so), just activate and away you go. Works fine too, as far as I can tell. I’ve been using for some time without any problems
WP Super Cache – for all the hooks and smooth work with multi-site.
W3 Total Cache for sure.
Instead of having one plugin for minify, one for sync with CDN, one for cache, database cache… W3 Total Cache put all that in one single plugin, with decrease the server load a lot.
And for the please who says W3 Total Cache is resource hungry… well… choose a better host, seriously. Today, a host with LiteSpeed (better than Apache), CloudLinux, OnApp and eAccelerator on by default is prety cheap… people use W3 Total Cache in lowpowered servers with oversell on them… ofc it will end up bad.
W3 Total Cache is the best option for sure. Can’t configure it? Google is your friend. There are lots and lots of configuration guides for it.
Just my opinion, ofc.
I manage a couple hundred WP sites, including WP multisite sites with over 30k users.
For a simple one-blog installation, these plugins are pretty much the same. The gain in configuration options vs the complexity of installation and maintenance can easily be weighed to provide the right caching system for you. When in doubt, ANY will provide the benefit of caching to a simple installation with minimal labor involved.
However, when you’re using a multisite setup, especially a larger one, you REALLY need to be more careful. Most of them simply don’t support multisite installation, and almost all that do support a multisite installation require manual activation for each child blog. Further, all of the pre-built caching systems out there that offer disk-based caching simply don’t provide a broad structured or tiered format. Currently, they either limit the cache to a certain number of items – intentionally or not – or they recreate the webfilesystem (limiting it by way of filesystem limits), or they create a single folder with ALL of the cache files within it. In any case, they simply don’t address static filesystem limits in a way that enables very large sites to operate easily…and in doing so can actually slow down very large sites!
To get around this, I’ve rewritten portions of the Quick Cache plugin to use a tiered folder structure.
Sadly, unlike some of the other options available, Quick Cache doesn’t provide the ability to have islands of PHP executable scripts (for stuff like ads or uncached database info within a page).
Anyway…I use Quick Cache, W3TC and WPSC depending on the specific sites needs and server abilities. More often than not, I use the modified Quick Cache because it is much more scalable.
I have used both and QuickCache, but tending to settle on Supecache for the best balance of complexity and features. Works well on multisite and working well on nginx.
Thanks for all the comments guys, very interesting stuff!
Quick Cache and Hyper Cache are great option for not so techie users as they work out of the box with the default settings and really do their job. Both work also on shared hosting and managed servers and will speed up smaller and middle-range sites. I use both also for client sites and so far fully satisfied.
I recently activated APC cache (or let activate by hosting provider) at some sites and that really brings another level in speed, also in the backend – I noticed up to 50% savings in memory use! You can use this plugin by WP core dev Mark Jaquith if APC is available for your server: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apc/
If both of the above is available and you’re international users having WordPress and all plugins localized you should consider using the “Mo Cache” plugin which will speed up your language file loading: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mo-cache/ — I have this in use and it’s really awesome!
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I have found for my different environments, that Quick Cache does the trick pretty painlessly and actually seems to have the smallest thumbprint on my server resources. While using both of the others, during peak times (heavy visitor traffic) I would get lots of lag and even timeout issues.
Switched over to Quick Cache, with same amount of traffic – none of the same issues.
I use Super Cache
always get great results with this
tried on various servers – never had an issue with it to be honest.
I have tried Total Cache before but just couldnt get on it -
I have tried WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache with limited success due, I think, to my being new to WP as I am currently switching my sites from Joomla.
The main problems I have experienced seem to around compatibility with other plugins.
I have now invested in cloud hosting with a new web host and the speed is very good without any cache. At a price though.
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My recommendation for a site with medium to low traffic is not a plugin at all but Cloudflare. It offers caching and a degree of security with a setup that is amazingly painless. Pointing your DNS to Cloudflare is the hardest part. The basic version is free and there’s no lock in. And if you’re loathe to give up your caching plugin (I still use W3TC), W3TC includes built-in integration with Cloudflare. For non-techies it’s a no brainer.
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While I find some of the options a bit overwhelming, W3TC has lead me to investigate and implement both Cloudflare (as mentioned above) and MaxCDN. While I’m still trying to figure out why Hostgator’s VPS install of WordPress has more caching options available in W3TC than my manual install, that is a minor issue compared to the gains I’ve seen by shifting content off my server.