Thread: Plug-in for caching wordpress sites

Although the plug in will help in that the website will load faster for people retuning to the website, Initial visitors will still have the issue of having the website load slowly the first time they visit the website.

In today's market, if the website does not load in 3-5 seconds, you are going to lose half your traffic even before you begin.

Just my 2 cents.

Reading through the description from the link you gave, this plug-in is a server-side cache for your PHP pages, meaning it will have no effect at all on your graphics which you specifically mention as problematic.

To clear up what that means, when somebody visits your blog, the server is running a script and executing several database queries to retrieve and display the HTML page. The thing is though, people are probably viewing your blog more frequently than that content is actually changing. So what this plug-in does is create a static HTML file on the server. Now when somebody visits your blog, if there is nothing new to show, it can bypass all the queries and processing and just show that HTML page.

This is a highly effective way to reduce the need for processing power on high-traffic blogs. However if you don't get much traffic I don't think you will notice any difference, and, as I mentioned, it has no relation to your images, which are already static files to begin with.

A client-side cache (as opposed to the server-side) is when your (you as the visitor to the site) browser stores HTML files, style sheets, scripts, images, etc. on your own computer as temporary files. That's what Chief Tutor is referring to above. You can make this more effective for your images by adding "Expires Headers."

When you download a file, the first information you get is not the file itself, but rather information about what the file is (is it an image, an HTML page, or a PDF for example), how it's encoded, what to do with it (should your browser prompt you to save it somewhere or should it just display it), and other such information. That information is sent in "headers," and you can configure your server to send a header that tells the computer of the person downloading the file how long to store a cache of that file. That's the expires header.

Okay, so enough blab about the technical stuff, how do you do it? Go into your websites files and look for a file called .htaccess (note the dot in front indicates that it is a "hidden" file in Unix-style systems).

If you use FTP you might need to go into your preferences or something and set it to show hidden files if it does not by default. If you use SSH to access your server, then you'll need to append the 'a' flag on the 'ls' command (like this: 'ls -a') to see hidden files.

Edit that file and add the following code:

Code:

<FilesMatch "\.(png|gif|jpg|jpeg)$">
ExpiresDefault A7776000
</FilesMatch>

That basically says that if the file the server is delivering has a .png, .gif, .jpg, or .jpeg extension, then the default Expires Header should tell the browser to store the file in cache up to 3 months (7776000 is 90 days in seconds, the A before it stands for "Access" meaning that much time after the file has been accessed).

Save those changes (and upload to the server if necessary) and hopefully your visitors will not have to download the same images again (for at least 3 months anyway).

Here are a couple things to keep in mind:

• As Chief Tutor mentioned, this only helps with returning visitors
• If you change an image that is related to the page layout, then depending on where in the directory hierarchy you placed the .htaccess file, you may need to rename that file to force browsers to download it again

WP Super Cache for wordpress is pretty cool. W3 Total Cache too, both for wordpress.