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02.26.10
Adding Site Caching To Your Wordpress Blog
 By Michael Gray
The question for today's post comes from Meg Geddes aka NetMeg. She wants to know more about setting up caching on Wordpress.
Ok, let's get the big question out of the way. What is caching and why do you want it? Basically, caching will store copies of pages that have already been served from your webserver so that they don't have to be called from the database every time they are requested and don't have to be parsed through the PHP engine. The whole process is very similar to browser caching, except it works in reverse. Caching can be beneficial if you have a very busy website with lots of traffic or are experiencing burst traffic, which might happen from something like the Digg Effect or Slashdot Effect. Caching can also help because it addresses some performance issues that occur within Wordpress. If you do things like not including numbers in your permalinks structure, serving the pages from the cache really improves performance.
That said, there are some downsides to caching. If you have comments and have caching enabled, the comments don't show right away. If you aren't careful about how you configure the cache, the feeds may not update in a timely fashion. Additionally if you use scheduled posts, instead of publishing on demand, caching support is sketchy at best. Lastly, caching doesn't always play nicely with other plugins. Even with these drawbacks, IMHO it's still worth activating caching on your Wordpress blog.
I'm going to recommend that you go with the Super Cache plugin from Donncha O Caoimh. Lately, a lot of people have been talking about W3 Total Cache, but I would recommend you avoid using that plugin if at all possible. I tried it out on my blog, and it didn't work as well as Super Cache. My hosting company TigerTech (an awesome company, by the way) gave me a graph showing how the CPU utilization went up when I switched to W3 Total Cache, so learn from my mistake and don't go there.
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Here's a screen shot of my settings:
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About
the Author:
Michael Gray is SEO specialist and publishes a Search Engine Industry blog at www.Wolf-Howl.com. He has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing, helping both small and large companies increase their search engine visibility, traffic, and sales. Michael is a current member of Internet Marketing of New York ( IM-NY.org) and a guest speaker on Webmaster Radio. He is also an editor for the popular search engine new website Threadwatch.org.
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