Cache or not to Cache wordpress

[Gary Pickles]

Hi All,

I’ve setup a few wordpress sites now and one has come back to me asking if we can speed the load times up, It’s a static site not too may updates and no comments, should i use a Caching plugin? and if so, could you recommend one to use.

[Alen]

You should always cache. Server will always be faster at returning just simple HTML file of off local disk, than accessing database or hitting some API. Caching is a broad subject and there’s all kinds of ways you can cache data. With WordPress most of the plugins come with variety of options, I think best thing to do is to install one and test it out.

See:

• http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-wordpress-caching-plugins/
• Also this http://wp-rocket.me/ (PAID, i havent used it tho)

Make sure to test before and after… check out WebPageTest.org and when performing tests set Advanced Settings to fit your testing criteria and set Number of Tests to Run to something like 5.

@megarypickles-com don’t be afraid to test, hopefully you are able to test on a staging server first before deploying to live site. If you’re testing live make sure to at least make a full backup of your data and all the files. I use VaultPress/BlogVault for this purpose. In case something breaks, I can one click restore.

Hope that helps.,

Alen

[Gary Pickles]

Thank you Alen for your comprehensive answer, It is a live site yes, so I’ll back up first and test.

Gary

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