WordPress Caching Optimization and Performance

There are tons of good and bad reviews for Plugins that Optimize and increase Performance for WordPress. All of them leave out these useful bits of information that are probably of more interest to experts than novices. And that's not being mean to novicies, it's tempting them to become experts too by learning.

All of them do a good job in terms of speeding things up.

WP Optimize

Best Features;

• Shows Progress of Cache as it's being created, without refreshing page
• Cache and Minification can be turned on or off
• Cleans up after itself after being disabled and deletes most of its cached files (leaves CSS minified stuff behind)

Worst Issue(s);

• The cache contains a bunch of files with mobile and desktop and 'mystery' files all combined.
• For some odd reason, it does NOT generate cache files for desktop pages until they are visited. Even when 'pre-loading'.
• Appears to be Case Sensitive and will build two different caches if Camel Case (look it up) is used to make website names easier to read. This is one thing that I would love to know the origins on with Microsoft and their decision to have a case insensitive OS. Saves a LOT of trouble (sorry, just a side note there without being disparaging towards Linux, etc.).
• OK documentation, others do a much better job.
• Lots of files (especially CSS, even when combined, etc.) makes Google live page tests grumpy about exceeding their "Download Allownance" (or whatever they're calling it now).

WP Fastest Cache

Best Features;

• Simple Cache with single files for each page,
• Preaload just works, without having to visit a page one time (unlike WP Optimize)
• Very simple and concise interface. All Cache and Minification Options on a single page (with Help Links). Although for novices, it might be a bit overwhelming to have all the stuff presented in one huge menu.

Worst Issue(s);

• The progress of building the cache isn't updated live, but rather requires a refresh of the Admin Page
• Poor wording on some of the documentation (Example: "Restart Preload After Completed", OK, how about "Restart Preload after Completing", but that's just the beginning. What does that mean. What if means is "runs continuously to build cached pages" OR "starts over" OR "starts rebuilding cache as soon as it's finished" OR "repeats". Get it? Well, none of those descriptions are used in their documentation. That seems mean, because they did try and do documentation. However, the point of documentation is to help people understand, and if it doesn't achieve that goal, then it isn't very good documenation. But hey, it's better than a lot of other Plugins. It is obvious that the person writing the documentation does not speak English as a native language. And that is not a derogatory comment. It is a compliment in that the person speaks and writes more languages than me. So they're more capable than I am in some respects. But at the same time they should hire or reaquest a native English speaker to go in and clean up the wording.
• Auto Cache Settings available for each page need to be done from the "Classic" WordPress Editor, not a page builder like Elementor. No big deal, but...
• Does a poor job of cleaning up after itself when disabled, leaving a bunch of file and stuff behind in the cache directory.
• Doesn't seem to do HTTP / HTML compression into GZ (Gunzip) files

Not Sure Things

• Puts SVG stuff into the HTML file. So slightly larger HTML files than other. That makes Bing grumpy because files end up being over their magic 256 K limit.

WP Rocket

Best Features;

• Stupid fast. Even page builder sites like Elementor load in well under triple digit mS. IE, 69 miliseconds.
• Great documentation
• Makes Googles "live page test" VERY happy with very few CSS resources being over the Google "allotment".
• When updating a page, does a decent job spotting the change, rebuilding the cache (just for that one page) most of the time. Sometimes it waits until the page is visited one time (IE, doesn't Pre Load it)

Worst Issue(s);

• No way to turn Cache off or on, unless... There's a plugin they make to turn off cache. Not a switch for turning on or off, but enabling / disabling the plugin to turn cache on or off. Although there is a Preload on / off check box which achieves more or less the same thing.
• NO indication of cache progress (other than watching one's CPU usage spike while the cache is built, expected of course, but...) And no summary of number of cached pages.
• Preload Links feature actually slows things down.
• ANY change made to settings will trigger automatic rebuilding of cached files. Understandable that they need to be rebuilt, but removing control of the rebuild process so completely from the end user (especially experts) seems cruel.

Best Features;

• S

Worst Issue(s);

• T

Other Thoughts

It would be great to have one of these guys have an admin interface that shows the cache status, files, what it's doing, etc. all live updated without page refreshes.

Bloat Items to Watch Out for

SkyBoot Icons (part of Elementor or addon for Elementor)