Cape Ealing

This site has been getting sluggish – too many database calls in all the widgets etc – so I thought I would try and speed things up. Throughout this process, I’ve been using the very helpful ‘is my blog working‘ tester to check delivery / processing times. It’s interesting to check this site against others like the BBC News site etc. Anyway, having completed the super-easy process, I can confirm that Super-Cache really does speed things up. Where my ‘page generation time’ was 500ms or so, it’s now 33ms. All I did was the following two steps. I had no difficulties with either (unusually). [Since installation, I’ve also been using the websiteoptimization.com analyzer which gives very helpful breakdown of file sizes, script sizes etc.]

The first step was to allow the caching of database queries. I confess that I don’t know if this actually worked, but this guidesuggested making the following easy addition to the wp-config.php file which I thought I might as well try:

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

super cache

Then, I installed wp-super-cache which has been developed by Donncha O Caoimh, Irish WordPress developer and sometimes photographer (see right).

The first instruction from the wp-super-cache installation guide is to check you have “the Apache mod mime and mod rewrite modules installed”. I had no idea of what that means, but looking in the .htaccess file it appeared that I probably did and I thought I would just give it a go. For more information on mod rewrites see this guide.

Anyway, it sounds ridiculous but there’s nothing really to report – except that it worked ‘staight out of the box’! The only change I made was to change the ‘expiry time’ (ie the frequency that the cached pages are destroyed from 1 hour (3600 seconds) to 24 hours (86,400 seconds) as that suits my site best.

I was expecting this post to describe in boring detail all the twists and turns involved. But there weren’t any. So, a boring post (and one I nearly ditched) but thought it as good to post a positive review about an easy installation.

Post-script:
The only other thing I did was to install the ‘bad behaviour‘ plug-in. Super-Cache put me on to this and I thought I might as well include an anti-spammer plugin.
Ben