Both WP Super Cache and Hyper Cache are among the top three caching plugins for WordPress. But a blog can’t have both these plugins active at the same time. So you just have to pick one. This post will help you make a decision.
On a one of my earlier posts, I discussed about W3 Total Cache as a caching plugin for WordPress. And I also suggested that it’s not the best plugin suits shared hosting environment. And it’s not the plugin for a person who just getting started with WordPress or web development. If you have a VPS and if you think you have what it takes to configure the plugin, by all means go for it. But if you’re on Shared hosting or new to WordPress, you probably need to stick with WP Super Cache or Hyper Cache and change to W3 Total Cache as you gain more experience.
Both these plugins work well on shared hosting. They also work well on VPS. But W3 total cache works better on VPS. Depending on my experience on shaved hosting, Hyper Cache worked best for me. Hyper Cache is faster than WP Super Cache and it uses less resource.
WP Super Cache sometimes has problems when mod_rewrite is disabled on server. Hyper Cache will be fine without mod_rewrite. I know this doesn’t apply to most of you since mod_rewrite is very regular for shared hosting environment. But my point is that Hyper Cache uses less server resources and it’s a perfect example of it.
Below are the page speed test results of a sample WordPress blog post using both plugins separately. Browser used for these tests is Internet Explorer 8 and tests were performed from Dulles, VA, USA. Blog was a brand new one and had only Akismet, SEO Ultimate and WordPress.com Stats plugins alone with one of caching plugins above. Hosting server was located at Germany and there was no CDN used.
According to the test result above, page took 3.87 seconds to be fully loaded. Repeat view took 3.33 seconds. That’s a very good speed for a site. Let’s take a look at WP Super Cache test results
As you can see blog with WP Super Cache took 4.21 seconds to load which is still a good speed. But remember, this was a brand new blog. Numbers can be lot higher on an established blog. Anything below 8 seconds will be good for a WordPress site on shared hosting. Repeat view took only 2.47 seconds. It’s better than Hyper Cache plugin. But is it better enough? It may be, but I would still stick with Hyper Cache.
But there’s something missing on Hyper Cache. It does not support CDN. You can have CDN for WP Super Cache with help of CDN Sync Tool. CDN does make big impact on page speed. So if you want to use CDN, WP Super Cache is the only choice for you. If you’re not, then it’s Hyper Cache.
