Does my hosting.com Managed WordPress site need a caching plugin?

What is a caching plugin?

Caching plugins are very popular plugins used in WordPress to help reduce the amount of PHP needed to deliver a WordPress website to a visitor. To do this, they store generated pages in HTML files rather than generating a new page for every visitor.

Do I need a caching plugin on hosting.com Managed WordPress?

A caching plugin is not required to use Managed WordPress and our full-page caching/CDN. But, your site will still benefit from a caching plugin. Why?

Even with our optimized Cloudflare Enterprise caching, not every page visit will hit the cache. When a page request results in a cache miss, WordPress must generate the page manually. This results in a PHP process being invoked, which then builds the page and hands it off to the CDN.

To speed up the process on subsequent cache misses, a caching plugin is beneficial to help reduce PHP use on cache misses. This is because PHP is inherently slow. The result is that your site will still be performant even if the pages are not cached in the CDN.

Which caching plugin does hosting.com recommend?

When it comes to caching plugins, there are definitely quite a few out there and the good news is that we’re compatible with all of them.

Now, we do have our recommendations. If you’re just looking for a free caching plugin to create a page cache, then you can’t go wrong with W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

That said, if you’re looking for a “caching meets optimization” type of plugin, then we highly recommend WP Rocket. WP Rocket is much more than just a caching plugin. It has many optimization features to help with core web vitals such as:

• Critical CSS generation
• CSS/JavaScript optimization
• JavaScript deferment
• JavaScript delay

These features will dramatically help improve your core web vital scores. The article Using the WP Rocket plugin on hosting.com Managed WordPress shows how to configure WP Rocket to work well on your hosting.com Managed WordPress site.