Free, and the fastest caching available on WordPress if your host runs LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed. That conditional is the whole story: caching implemented at the web server level rather than in PHP is a different class of thing from a plugin writing HTML files.

Check your server software before reading any further comparison, because if you are on LiteSpeed the decision is made and it costs nothing. Beyond page caching it handles image optimisation, critical CSS, JavaScript deferral and object caching, which covers most of what the paid plugins sell. On Apache or Nginx it still functions as a general optimisation plugin but loses its central advantage, and you would be choosing it for the wrong reasons. Many budget and mid-range hosts now run LiteSpeed specifically so they can offer this.

• Price: Free
• Requires: LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server for the main benefit
• Best for: Anyone on LiteSpeed hosting, without exception
• Watch out for: Much less compelling on Apache or Nginx

The commercial default, at $59 a year for one site, $119 for three, and $299 for fifty, with options for 100 or 500 sites. Its reputation rests on working well on activation rather than on having the most settings.

That matters more than it sounds. Most performance plugins can be configured into an excellent result and misconfigured into a broken site, and the difference between those outcomes is usually hours of somebody’s attention. WP Rocket’s defaults are chosen to be safe, so the common case is that you install it and the site is faster with nothing broken. It covers page caching, file optimisation, lazy loading, database cleanup and preloading, and its JavaScript delay features are relevant to INP. At fifty sites for $299, the agency tier is priced sensibly against per-site alternatives.

• Price: $59/yr for 1 site, $119 for 3, $299 for 50
• Requires: Nothing specific; works on any stack
• Best for: Sites wanting a good result without tuning
• Watch out for: No free version to evaluate with

The enthusiast’s choice, at Starter $59 a year for one site, Pro $109 for three, Business $229 for 25 and Unlimited $279, with a 14-day free trial giving full access before any charge.

Its design goal is optimising for what users actually experience rather than for what a lab test rewards, which produces different defaults from its competitors: more aggressive handling of fonts, images and scripts, and features aimed specifically at the interaction responsiveness INP measures. The $279 unlimited tier is the standout price in this comparison, undercutting WP Rocket’s fifty-site plan while removing the site limit entirely. The trial is the right way to evaluate it, because aggressive optimisation is exactly the kind that occasionally breaks something and you want to find out on your own site.

• Price: $59/yr for 1 site; $279 for unlimited sites
• Requires: Nothing specific
• Best for: Agencies, and people who will tune settings
• Watch out for: Aggressive defaults; use the 14-day trial

A hosted optimisation service rather than a plugin, doing the processing on its own infrastructure and serving the result through its CDN. It produces dramatic scores, and it is metered in a way that catches people out.

The free plan covers 1,000 pageviews a month and 1GB of CDN bandwidth. Starter is $8 a month, or $7 billed annually, for 8,000 pageviews. Plus is $22 a month, or $18 annually, for 40,000 pageviews and adds delayed scripts and LCP preload. Pro is $99.99 a month, or $83 annually, for 540,000 pageviews across three sites. Read those numbers against your actual traffic: a modest blog doing 50,000 monthly pageviews is already past the Plus tier, at which point a $59 annual plugin licence costs less than two months of the alternative. The service is genuinely effective; the meter is the thing to model.

• Price: Free for 1,000 views; $8, $22 or $99.99 a month by tier
• Requires: Routing traffic through their CDN
• Best for: Small sites, or sites where scores matter commercially
• Watch out for: Pageview meter; costs rise fast with traffic

The two long-standing free options, both still maintained, both entirely capable of page caching, and both suited to different people.

WP Super Cache does one thing, serving cached HTML, with few settings and little to misconfigure. For a brochure site or a blog on shared hosting it is genuinely sufficient and it will not break anything. W3 Total Cache is the opposite: extensive control over page, object, database, browser and CDN caching, which makes it powerful in knowledgeable hands and a reliable source of broken sites in others. If you know what an object cache is and which of these layers your site needs, W3TC gives you all of them for free. If you do not, WP Super Cache or a paid plugin with safe defaults is the better trade.

• Price: Both free
• Requires: Nothing; W3TC benefits from Redis or Memcached
• Best for: Simple sites, and technical users on a budget
• Watch out for: W3TC’s settings can break a site quickly

Not a caching plugin, and the most cost-effective addition to one: $29.95 a year for one site, $59.95 for three, and $124.95 for unlimited sites, with a 15% discount on renewal.

What it does is remove work rather than cache the result of doing it. Script manager lets you disable individual plugin scripts on pages where they are not needed, so your contact form’s JavaScript stops loading on every post and your slider library stops loading on pages with no slider. That directly reduces main thread work, which is the INP problem caching cannot address. At $124.95 for unlimited sites it is the cheapest way for an agency to improve interaction responsiveness across a portfolio, and it complements rather than competes with any caching plugin here.

• Price: $29.95/yr for 1 site; $124.95 for unlimited
• Requires: A caching plugin alongside it
• Best for: Fixing INP by removing unnecessary scripts
• Watch out for: Disabling the wrong script breaks a feature