Through our Plugin of the Month series, we have been introducing to you plugins that are useful and deserve the attention of the WordPress community but are not very popular. We find the hidden gems of WordPress for you to make your lives easier. So for this month, we have an amazing caching plugin for you – Surge. 

But before we analyze the plugin, let’s look into what caching is and its importance.

Caching & WordPress

Google loves fast websites and website speed and response time determines the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking. Caching can improve your site’s overall performance and thus help you with load time and SEO. 

Caching is nothing but storing and reusing the assets elements to save server resources. Doing this allows a web page to be delivered to the visitor’s browser more quickly.

Unfortunately, the WordPress CMS doesn’t have a caching functionality in its core feature set. So you have to depend on other options to turn on caching, like using a caching plugin.

Benefits of caching

As mentioned above, caching leads to better website performance which will help you in the long run. Caching can also help reduce the load on your hosting server. This can save server memory and thus is helpful, especially for those with limited hosting plans. 

Users expect fast websites and caching paves the way for a better user experience. Clearing your cache can often help with troubleshooting too, depending on what you’re trying to fix.

You’ll want to empty out the cache when you’re making changes to your WordPress website and want to see them applied in real time. After making the changes, just empty the cache so that the new changes can be displayed to the website visitors. 

Surge Plugin

Don’t you love it when a plugin does just one thing and does it well, without any fuss? We do and that’s why we are featuring Surge this month!

Surge generates and serves static HTML files for your WordPress site, causing quicker requests, faster load times and a shorter time to first byte (TTFB).

Surge is a powerful little plugin that was developed purely to cache your websites. It is a relatively young plugin but has very good reviews from its users. The plugin can be downloaded for free from the repository. 

What makes Surge special?

There are plenty of caching plugins but there are several factors that will impress you to choose Surge. 

No fuss, it just works!

This is what I liked most about this plugin – no complications. Just install it and activate it. That’s it! No settings or confusing configurations. It works out of the box on any well-configured hosting platform. 

No bloats

It is common now to find plugins with so many unnecessary features that it ends up slowing down the website. Surge is different. It has just one and only one function – caching. And it does that perfectly. 

Speeds up your website

As you know, WordPress generates HTML pages dynamically by employing PHP code coupled with MySQL database queries. Surge generates and serves static HTML files for your WordPress site to get faster load times and a shorter time to first byte (TTFB). 

In various load tests, Surge has been shown to easily handle 1000-2500 requests per second at 100 concurrent, on a small single-core server with only 1 GB of RAM. That’s over 70 times faster than a stock WordPress install. 

Final Verdict

We recommend Surge as a perfect solution for your caching requirements. It is extremely easy to use and does not slow down your website. It does an amazing job of sticking to its one function. And is free too!