WordPress is great and I use it on every site I build. As I continually follow what is developed for this Content Management System, I realize that there are many things that blog owners can do to speed up their loading times. This doesn’t involve adding header codes to compress the content, rather utilizing a plugin that creates a HTML based document of your dynamic WordPress blog.
How To Cache WordPress for Maximum Efficiency
The caching techniques I’m going to be talking about later takes all of the dynamic PHP contents of your blog and puts it into a HTML document. That means this plugin takes your template (header, body, sidebar(s), footer) and articles and puts it into one document. The benefit of doing this is that the server does not need to “construct” the HTML document using various PHP calls to the MYSQL database and theme files each time a visitor loads your blog.
Let me put it to you in the simplest form possible – The difference between a cached blog and a standard WordPress install is monumental. A cached blog is like giving a person an infographic – one image with all the important information on it, organized and concise. A standard WordPress install (uncached blog) is like giving a person a 20 page report filled with text and telling them to make sense out of it. As you can see the benefits of caching your WordPress website is a very good idea.
The De Facto Standard for WordPress Caching – W3 Total Cache
This plugin combines various aspects of other plug-ins to ensure that everything is running at maximum efficiency. In this tutorial were going to look at how to set up this plugin and configure it.
Step One – Download and Install W3 Total Cache
This plugin can be found at this repository and installation with WordPress 3.0 is very easy. Simply upload it using WordPress’s built-in plug-in installation system and you’re ready to continue to step two.
Step Two – Page Cache Settings and Configuration
Caching pages will reduce the response time of your site and increase the concurrency (scale) of your web server.
All right in this step were going to be setting up the page cache for your WordPress website. Click the “W3 Total Cache” option under the settings tab in your WordPress administration area. You are now brought to the plugin’s main page with various settings and this step were just enough focus on the page cache configuration.
So go ahead and click the checkbox, enabling it. For most of you reading this, choosing Disk (Enhanced) is your best option for shared hosts. However if you happen to be on a dedicated or virtual server feel free to install APC caching which is what I use. Now click “save changes” to enable the caching on your site.
Step Three – Minify settings and configuration
Minification can decrease file size of HTML, CSS, JS and feeds respectively by ~10% on average.
Like in the previous step we are going to need to enable Minify for it to work on our WordPress blog, so enable it and click save changes, replicating the same option that you did in step two (IE – Disk Enhanced/APC). Now at the very top you’ll see “Minify Settings” – we’re going to need to configure it before this starts working.
Here’s what I have on my WordPress blog:
- HTML Minify settings: Enable
- JS Minify settings: Enable
- CSS Minify settings: Enable
There are a couple of them notes that you should be aware of:
- The JavaScript options are left unchecked due to various plugins dependencies on them. The plug-ins that depend on JavaScript to perform various tasks do not work if you combine them into one file and I know this from personal experience. This isn’t W3 total Cache’s fault rather the way the plugins are coated to specifically call the scripts in the document.
- For CSS minification to work you’re going to need to add each stylesheet to the plugin by hand. For most themes the default is: wp-content/themes/YourThemeName/style.css - if you need help finding yours feel free to ask me in the comments and I’ll take a look at your site.
Step Four – Database cache settings
Caching database objects may decrease the response time of your blog by up to 100x.
This plugin will also cache your database to make it more efficient when generating a page cache. Feel free to go to the plugin’s page and enable it.
This step is pretty easy because there are no options that you need to configure specific settings page.
Step five (optional) – CDN Configuration and Settings
If you utilize a Content Delivery Network to serve your files faster to your visitors than this plugin will also rewrite your URLs to the files on the CDN. This saves you a lot of time from having to go in manually to your theme files and edit each file accordingly. If you do not have a CDN then there’s no reason to do this step – you are finished! Although I would encourage you to take advantage of MaxCDN’s offer that I wrote about earlier which you can view here.
We’re going to need to configure the CDN settings of this plugin, so please click the, “CDN Settings”. On this page there is a box for you to insert your content delivery network URL which you can obtain from your provider. Simply enter your URL and click save changes in the plug-in will automatically start using the files on the CDN and rather than on your own web hosting server.
Conclusion — A Mighty Fast (Cached) WordPress Blog
Since utilizing this plug-in on my own personal blogs and clients blogs I’ve noticed a severe increase in the responsiveness and load times of each website. If you are serious about taking your blog and expanding its reader base a fast website is critical. Luckily people like Fredrick Townes create excellent solutions to take a couple hour optimization job and turn it into a 10 minute “push-button” cache job.
Do you currently use any caching plug-in for WordPress?
How has this plug-in affected your load speed?
Do you notice a difference?
Related articles on the Internet.
- W3 Total Cache : WordPress Caching Plugin (earnblogger.com)
- WordPress Caching: What’s the best Caching Plugin? (tutorial9.net)
20 Comments
Caching is one of the best of decreasing site load time as well as server load. As I know WordPress and it plugins uses up a lot of server resources and we really must work to decrease the server load otherwise we may have our account suspended or banned. I think W3 Total Cache is the best plugin for this. I also use it in my blog
Hi Alex, I also agree that W3 Total Cache is a great caching solution. I’ve seen some plugins (that are either poorly coded or “just work”) that really do a number on servers and their hosting accounts.
What’s interesting is that I added this cache plugin and took off the WP Super Chache and then Hostgator shut down my site due to an over burden on the server, telling me that the only plugin that really works is WP Super Cache, so once I put that one back everything was fine.
I thought that the plugin you write about was much better, but they apparently do not.
Hi JR,
I think Hostgator may be misinformed about WordPress Caching Technologies. W3 Total Cache does a superior job to WP Super Cache due to their abundance of caching and minification.
I guess you either have to play by the rules of your web host or move to a new one
Thanks for your comment!
Hi Brad
Not visited you for a while but I’m impressed with the site and the quality of the articles.
We corresponded some time ago regarding gzip via John Hoffs site.
I never did anything with the gzip but now that Google has announced that page load speed will be part of its algorithm, I’m taking a look at how to speed things up.
I had started looking at WP Super Cache but from what you are saying W3 Total Cache is better.
So I may investigate W3 Total Cache.
Like most people I hate messing around with my site but I have some knowledge of html and CSS and can follow basic coding instructions but I do want to keep it simple.
Great that you’ve explained what caching is and set out how to configure the plugin – couple of questions…
1 – what does “increase the concurrency (scale) of your web server.” mean?
2 – Looks as though there are potential problems with minifying JS and CSS – can you just choose to minify html or perhaps not use minify at all.
3 – What are you showing on the graphic after “There are a couple of them notes that you should be aware of:” – is it simply a screenshot of some of the W3 Total Cache settings.
Thanks for getting me interested in speeding up WordPress again.
Hey Keith,
Glad you could stop by – I do remember when we first started talking about Gzip compression.
To answer your questions (to the best of my ability
):
1 – That just means if you were going to scale your blog into a larger website, it would be easier to do because your blog is cached and ready for large spikes in traffic. (depending on your server)
2 – There are potential problems with minifying Javascript due to the way plugins call for specific libraries and their own code on your blog. If you don’t want to be bothered to troubleshoot your blog after you start minifying it, I wouldn’t do it.
3 – That’s what I have currently in the W3 Total Cache for this blog – the graphic just shows that you need to paste each CSS file into the plugin so that minificiation can occur.
Not a problem – Its what I like to do
Thanks for reply Brad.
I’ll give it a try.
These are great tips some I already knew and others I need to get working on. My site has been running a tad bit slow lately.
I switched to W3 Total Cache from WP Super Cache and I was impressed at the amount of options included with W3 Total Cache.
The best thing I like about the plugin is how easy it was to set everything, such as the minify settings. I believe with the newer version, it automatically picks up such things as your theme’s CSS file.
Great, thanks you for this article
Ohh, so this must be the secret. I heard already this stuff but not yet applied in my end. Have to try in the future. Thanks for the info.
Thank very much for information
I had not heard of W3 Total Cache and in fact, I was just getting introduced to WP Super Cache. Thanks for your thorough directions on how to download and install it. I am always looking for a better way in every part of my wordpress sites.
nice,thanks very much .
I am always WP Super Cache on all my WordPress blogs. Actually, I do not know how Caching works but a friend told me to use WP Super Cache so I uploaded and installed it. Anyway, This is the first time I heard about W3 Total Cache. I am not sure if it’ll work on my websites as well as my hosting site but I will surely try it. Thanks for sharing the info.
Hi,
Thanks for the post.I am going to give a try on my blog.
Hi Brad, thank you for this post. I am currently having an experimental blog at blogger and I’m planning to set up one with wordpress. I am in a stage of gathering useful data about wordpress that’s why I landed on this page. Thank you for providing this.
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Thank you man. Will try this for sure.
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