WordPress page caching sounds simple: generate a page once, store the finished HTML, and serve it again without rebuilding the full WordPress stack.
In theory, most page cache plugins should do something similar.
But I wanted to know how much difference there really is.
So I built a small benchmark script and tested several WordPress page cache plugins with 500, 2500, and 5000 total requests. The chart shows the average response time, or ART, across those runs.
The result was clear: there are real differences between page cache plugins. Some plugins do a very good job and really speed up a site. Others appear to add more overhead before returning the cached page.
A fast page cache should return the cached response as early as possible, before WordPress loads more PHP, plugins, theme code, or database logic than needed.
In my test, Mega Cache performed best.
That makes sense because Mega Cache is designed to run very early in the WordPress process. It uses the WP_CACHE drop-in mechanism, so cached HTML can be served before the full WordPress stack is loaded.
Mega Cache also supports several storage backends, including APCu, Redis, Memcached, MariaDB, MySQL, and file storage. It includes stats and debug views, so cache hits, skips, and storage behavior can be checked during testing.
That is why I use Mega Cache.
