There are many caching plugins to make your WordPress site fly, some of them are available for free, some of them have free features and the third group are plugins that you have get your card out if you want to give them a try.
Powered Cache is another caching plugin that falls in the second category, you get a lot of features for free and you have to get premium if you want to unlock others.
I don’t use caching plugins when I am using CloudFlare APO or CloudFlare Full Page Caching so I don’t have a favorite or a recommendation.
These are my thoughts about Powered Cache, a plugin with more than 2000 active installations.
Table of Contents
Powered Cache
Powered Cache has nine major sections at the moment of writing this post.
These are my thoughts about each one of the sections.
Basic Options
This section lets you enable page caching.
One thing that I like is that you can set the lifespan of the cache
Advanced Options
This options might not be needed by many users, you use this section in case you don’t want to create exceptions.
File Optimization
This section has options to minify HTML, CSS and Scripts. I checked the source code and this plugin does a better job than adsense when it comes to minification.
This section also has options to combine CSS and Scripts and I don’t do that at all since it is not recommended.
Media Optimization
My favorite plugin for lazy loading images, iframes and videos is Optimize More: Images
If you don’t want to have an extra plugin, you can lazy load your images using Powered Cache.
CDN Integration
This is a section that you find in most optimization plugins.
I don’t have uses for it since I use CloudFlare.
Preload
I love preloading the pages to make sure the visitors get the fastest version of your site.
You can enable preloading for your site posts, pages and taxonomies
If you want to use sitemap preloading, you have to buy premium.
Database
There are options to clean up the database inside the Powered Cache Plugin.
Extensions
These are the Powered Cache extension available for free:
- The CloudFlare Extension: Necessary if you add your sites to CloudFlare.
- The Heartbeat Extension: If you don’t need the heartbeat feature, you can disable it by using a code snippet.
These are premium extensions
- The Varnish Extension: If you use Cloudways like I do, you might want to use this.
- The Google Tracking Extension: I think that using Minimal Analytics is better than hosting Google Analytics locally.
- The Facebook Tracking: I don’t need this feature
Misc
You won’t find anything in this section to make your WordPress site faster
More about Speed Optimization
You might want to check some of these posts before you leave:
