I’ve installed the WP-Cache NoSymLink plugin to my site for a little experimentation. The goal of this is to cut down on the amount of time it takes to load the various pages and posts within my site, and this plugin is a tweaked version of the original WP-Cache plugin.
If you have a WordPress site that attracts a lot of traffic, this will help speed up page loading by a few seconds. What it does is takes some of the load off your server in terms of generating pages on the fly. With every, single post that you read on any WordPress site, the server it sits on pulls information from a handful of data sources to present you a web page on your browser.
Instead of dragging down server performance and making you wait for all this information to load from a database, the cache stores this data on a temporary basis to get the page to show up on your browser faster. This is really helpful if you have a site with a lot of traffic or host your WordPress blog on a server with a slow connection to the outside world.
Can’t say that I have the worst server or the number of readers that heeds the need for such a plugin, but I’ve noticed a little bit more speed to the load time on my site.
Thanks for this – useful link. Anything to speed the page load time up is good in my books.
WP-Cache is a great plugin (and was highly recommended to be used by anyone with a WordPress site by the developers at WordCamp) but there is one caveat that I found out about the hard way: when you are trying to update your site (change your sidebar, add some ads, etc), don’t forget about the cache being enabled!
I spent a lot of time being frustrated when trying to make a minor change to my php and it wasn’t displaying…when I realized that it was the cache in effect, I felt like an idiot. 😉
Thanks for the tip, John, I’ll have to check it out. I have WP-Cache installed, but from what I read on the NoSymLink site you need terminal access to the server to actually get it running right… So maybe my cache hasn’t actually been functional?
Anyway, it sounds like we’re in the same situation: Not enough visitors that we actually need the cache functionality right now. But if we post something sufficiently silly or brilliant to get slashdotted/dugg, then caching will be what keeps our site running.
Glad I could share the info with you all.
The NoSymLink version of the plugin is great. I tried the other route and had no success.
One of the guest bloggers @ Lorelle on WordPress recently did a good ‘3 ways to speed up wordpress’ post (http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/22/the-3-easiest-ways-to-speed-up-wordpress/) that doesn’t involve WP-Cache (so things will be that much speedier for pages that aren’t cached).