Blog Tipz

The average WordPress site, or any pages on the site, have a longer loading time than a traditional website that only contains HTML and CSS. Much of WordPress contains PHP scripts that add to the loading time.

Not everyone has the fastest, most advanced servers to host their sites on. For this reason, it may be necessary for you to begin caching, or at least looking into this form of website optimization, if you notice that your pages are taking a long time to load or you want to reduce the bandwidth that your site uses monthly, at least to some degree.

Keep in mind that this method doesn’t work for all sites, and it largely depends on how frequently you update files, what you are looking to get out of caching your site, and how your visitors’ experience will be affected by any form of caching. For one, I don’t recommend it for people who use JavaScript or Flash on their homepage that is required in order for visitors to properly navigate around your site. There are problems with the way certain plugins work to reduce the size of these files/redirecting to “fresh” pages.

In this post, I want to share some of the plugins that I use to cache my sites, as well as some others that you might find useful.

Note: While some of these can be combined to perform a better job, you have to do some testing to see how they interact with one another, especially if your site gets a lot of visitors.

WP Super Cache

This plugin is an extension of the original version, generating static HTML files form your dynamic WordPress blog. There are several options included with the plugin, including the ability to turn off or serve dynamic files to certain groups of visitors. This is the best plugin (if you install any) for combatting the “social networking” effect of having a lot of visitors access your site in a relatively short period.

Downloads: 526,000

WP Widget Cache

This plugin can be used in addition to WP-Cache or WP Super Cache, ideal for caching the widgets of your site. Even though you might not think of your sidebars taking a long time to load, they are often more complex than a traditional post, especially when they are trying to access the database. Additionally, you rarely update the sidebar widgets, other than adding in new advertisements or changing links.

Installation is easy – download the plugin, upload it to your server, activate it, and you’re ready to go.

Downloads: 15,000

Hyper Cache

This plugin was specially designed for sites that run on low resources. It is able to manage both plain and GZIP compressed pages, automatically cleans the system to reduce disk usage, and is easy to configure.

Some configuration is required.

Downloads: 17,000

WP Minify

This plugin integrates the Minify Engine into your WordPress blog, helping combine and compress JavaScript and CSS files to improve page load time. It can be easily integrated and allows you to save bandwidth and page load times.

Some configuration may be required.

Downloads: 1,400

CDN Tools

Not specially for caching, serving your files from a CDN (content delivery network) versus your own servers can save time and costs, especially if you have a moderately popular site. It allows you to load data from Google’s servers, including larger JS libraries or from a CDN.

This is for more advanced, popular sites that need more balancing, especially to save costs in the long-term. Therefore, this plugin isn’t for everyone and requires quite a bit of configuration before you can see its effects.

Downloads: 700

Batcache

Although this plugin is compatible with “up to WordPress 2.6,” it should still work with 2.8 (updated in April 2009. The plugin uses the Memcached technology to store and render pages. It can be used where file-based caching is not practical or not desired. A 40x reduction in page loading times was found when they tested the plugin in development use. Demand to the CPU and database was also reduced during periods of extremely high traffic.

Downloads: 1,200

HyperDB

This is another plugin that will simply help speed up your website by optimizing your database. It allows you to profile your database to ensure that your site remains up even when you server is (at least partially) down.

Downloads: 400

Use Google Libraries

This plugin was solely designed to help create a better experience for your visitors and take some load off your servers. Fairly easy to install and designed for anyone looking to reduce the load on their servers.

Downloads: 4,600

PHP Speedy

This plugin is a bit more complicated than some of the others, and may cause problems if you want to take advantage of all the features if you don’t know what you’re doing. It drastically reduces the number of requests to your server and in turn, this reduces the time it takes to load pages.

Conclusion

If you find that certain areas of your site take a long time to load for no clear reason, it might be worth looking into at least one of these plugins. Most are compatible with WordPress 2.8 and can do a good job at ensuring it takes a longer time for your site to go down if you see a large influx of new visitors in a short period of time.

I may take a more in-depth look at some of the plugins in the future, as this was simply a roundup of the more popular, recently-updated versions.