Wordpress Blog Optimization Tip of the Week – WP Cache

 

One of the great things about Wordpress is the amount of plugins available designed to increase the functionality of your blog. If you have not already one should visit the wordpress plugin directory . One word of caution, not all plugins are a thoroughly tested as I would like. Install plugins at your own risk. Before installing, I like to visit the plugins homepage and read any reviews. Then, before any install,  I make a backup of my blog. I am overly cautious and so far have been lucky and not had to go to any backups. Also, make sure that the version of your plugin is compatible with your version of wordpress. Just look in the documentation for the plugin, then go to your Wordpress Dashboard, and at the very bottom of the page is your wordpress version. Only after you are comfortable install the plugin and test your site functionality.

 

I have digressed a little. While research the wordpress plugins to help my performance issues I came across a plugin call WP-Cache (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/) . Basically, without getting too technical, WP-Cache makes your website more static. But does that not defeat the purpose of having a dynamic website? Yes and no. Wordpress stores all your articles in a MYSQL database. Without a utility such as WP-CACHE, your blog must go out to the MYSQL database for each article and link on your blog every time someone visits your site. This can really slow things down when you start to get a lot of traffic like I or my friends have. In general terms WP-CACHE takes a snapshot of your page, and stores is on disk when it is visited. So, the next time a visitor comes to that particular page the server will not have to go out to the database to get the page, but your servers disk instead which is much faster.

 

Some of the features of WP-CACHE include the ability to set how long before a page expires and gets re-cached. I set mine to about 8 hours. You can also delete the cache of expired pages at anytime manually. Finally, one thing to note is this plugin works well with Wordpress, so if you change a post or add one it will show up on the page without you having to delete the Cache, and if for some reason you add a new link, widget etc that does not show up right away, all you need to do is go into the admin panel and delete the cache. 

 

In summary, WP-CACHE allows your server to serve hundreds of times more pages a second and also reduces the response time in delivering a page to your reader from several tenths of a second to less than a millisecond. Even if you don’t have your own server and have a shared server, WP-CACHE makes sense as it will help improve your blogs response time. I know this plugin had tremendously helped my blogs, and your readers and search engines will be much happier to have a more responsive blog as your traffic grows.

 

Now, for those daring enough, I just discovered tonight, a next generation of WP-CACHE that boasts increased performance, called WP Super Cache (http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/). I have not tried this yet so will leave this for another review…