Wordpress Plugins - super cache - wots it do?

[iArtist]

I've got this wordpress plugin

I don't recall installing it but it's there and it's active

http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

I read that it speeds page load and what not but what I am wondering is does the 'cache' effect interfere at all with seo?

I don't really understand what the cache thing is all about

(not a shocker that!)

 

[Faevilangel]

Basically the cache plugin, makes a static copy of your website at set intervals, and shows this "backup" to viewers of the site. This enables the site to do less database queries gathering all the information. On sites with loads of images or content then it's a useful plugin unless you're constantly editing the existing content.

 

[iArtist]

Basically the cache plugin, makes a static copy of your website at set intervals, and shows this "backup" to viewers of the site. This enables the site to do less database queries gathering all the information. On sites with loads of images or content then it's a useful plugin unless you're constantly editing the existing content.

I do edit the content often so I have deactivated the plugin for now.

 

[Waumsley]

Caching is worth looking in to for better speeds

The W3 Total Cache plugin seems to get better test results. You can control what you want to cache. For example just the files you are not likely to edit much like javascript and CSS.

If by editing the content often you mean adding new posts you will be fine with it on. Anyhow you can always clear the cache when you have changed something.

 

[iArtist]

Caching is worth looking in to for better speeds

The W3 Total Cache plugin seems to get better test results. You can control what you want to cache. For example just the files you are not likely to edit much like javascript and CSS.

If by editing the content often you mean adding new posts you will be fine with it on. Anyhow you can always clear the cache when you have changed something.

I edit the text and graphics on my pages fairly often and don't really know enough about cache to delete or configure settings, so hoping I can manage without. Is my page load speed slow would you say?

 

[Waumsley]

Is my page load speed slow would you say?

A bit. It comes in at 7-8 seconds to fully load using this http://tools.pingdom.com .

Wordpress can be slow and with Google making speed a factor in ranking there is no shortage of information. This is an article on setting up Total Cache if you think you need it http://zemalf.com/1443/w3-total-cache/. It is worth testing as you can always empty the cache and disable.

There are a couple of plugins that could help you (that you don't need to mess with) .

WP Smush.it. This optimises your images as you upload (and you can run it to do the already uploaded ones too)

WP File Cache. This just caches the routine database queries.

Hope this helps

 

[playboy_bunnie]

...Is my page load speed slow would you say?

If you are referring to the lea-graphics website in your signature...

It could be better, your site utilises 15 javascript files, 7 stylesheets and 20 background images and thats just on the homepage. Put simply your site could do with optimising, including the use of caching (but not with plugins; I've found them to be more tedious that owt else.)

I'll be happy to help if needs be (FREE of course )

 

[iArtist]

I added the sushit plugin, wp cache plugin and also installed this

CSS And Script File Aggregation

How soon should I be able to tell if these are improving things?

 

[harshini]

Please say me about wordpress.

 

[harshini]

Hi.. Thanks

 

[playboy_bunnie]

The new plugin seems to have improved it somewhat, but there is still room for improvement.

Page Speed Grade:
(85%) 83%
YSlow Grade:
(75%) 75%

Page load time: 2.68s
Total page size: 1.25MB
Total number of requests: 47

 

[iArtist]

The new plugin seems to have improved it somewhat, but there is still room for improvement.

ooh yes, big improvement!!

I installed a few things, the mashup thing for images reduced the image sizes by up to 20% and with over 600 images on the site this is a good reduction

 

[Faevilangel]

For image cropping and reduction, download timthumb. It's a brilliant tool which allows you to crop and edit an image within WP.

 

[iArtist]

Is there a limit to how many plugins you should have?

 

[Faevilangel]

Is there a limit to how many plugins you should have?

The more plugins you have, the more items you're website needs to load, meaning longer to load your website. Only use plugins that are absolutely necessary.

 

[Alex Rosicky]

For image cropping and reduction, download timthumb. It's a brilliant tool which allows you to crop and edit an image within WP.

Yes, this tool really works

 

[iArtist]

I was looking for timthumb plugin and instead was offered a timthumb scanner details thus:

"The recent Timthumb.php vulnerability (discussed here) has left scores of unsuspecting bloggers hacked. It's the perfect combination of not so easy to fix for the technically disinclined, and easy to find and exploit for the malicious - resulting in a disastrous number of compromised sites."

 

[Dominic Taylor]

I use WPSupercache with the mod_rewrite setting and cache preloading on our clients' busy sites and it's fantastic - most pages are served right from disk without involving PHP, leading to incredibly quick load times.

Along with minifying js/css, optimising images, and using its CDN option to serve static images from our Nginx cluster and set expiry times, there's no reason for Wordpress sites not to fly.

Here's one site being hit with 5000 requests, with 100 simultaneous hits:

./ab -n 5000 -c 100 http://www.carsuk.net/category/reviews/alfa-romeo-car-reviews/

Concurrency Level:      100
Time taken for tests:   2.951 seconds
Complete requests:      5000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      257213488 bytes
HTML transferred:       255537148 bytes
Requests per second:    1694.23 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       59.024 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.590 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          85113.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
              min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    1   0.7      1       6
Processing:     6   40  30.9     33     509
Waiting:        3   34  20.1     29     251
Total:         13   41  30.8     34     509

Not bad

The cache refreshes on every post/comment but if you have a more complex site it's probably worth investigating other options which are more granular and can cache more specific things to allow more plugins to run - these full page-cache modules can be a bit extreme depending on your traffic levels and interactivity etc.