This week in caching: WP page-cache plugins benchmarked

This week in caching: WP page-cache plugins benchmarked

Numbers from folks who actually A/B'd their plugin:

— Agency site — moving from a generic cache plugin to one with proper preloading kept the cache warm; cold-load TTFB went from 1.6s (first visitor pays) to a steady 180ms because the crawler primed pages after each purge.
— WooCommerce — enabling separate cache for mobile fixed a layout bug but cost ~half the hit rate; lesson: only split the cache when the HTML genuinely differs.
— Blog — combining page cache with critical-CSS inlining cut LCP from 3.1s to 1.4s; the cache made repeat loads near-instant, critical CSS fixed the first paint.

The pattern: the plugin matters less than whether it preloads and how it keys mobile.

Bookmark: test with a cold cache (incognito + purge) — warm-cache demos lie.