You may have heard of them before, but do you know what they do? Or why you might want one? The world of WordPress plugins can be quite a confusing and cluttered space. One realm of plugins, however, should not be foreign to you, especially if your site get’s quite a few hits, ends up on Digg, or get’s into the Reddit realm. These plugins are ‘caching’ pulgins. Not sure what caching is?
a cache … is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.
-via Wikipedia.org
Essentially, ‘cache’ is a holding place for data that’s requested a lot. How can this make your WordPress site faster you might ask? Well, every time a visitor lands on your website that’s using WordPress, quite a bit is happening on the backend. A typical theme will request things like your site’s Title, Tagline, Browser Title, and other items that will hardly change. Each one of these requests comes from your database. Every time WordPress has to go to your database, that is a bottle neck. We would like as few things as possible to come from the database. What a caching plugin will do is find the pages that are being requested most often, and store them as a static file on the server, reducing the load on the server to 1 page, plus the images needed, instead of making those requests from the database.
When it comes to plugins to manage your cache and create static files from your most commonly requested pages or posts, I’ve come down to two that I find the most useful. They cover two different circumstances…Ease of use, and fully customized. Let me be clear, while caching your site can help, depending on your hosting environment you may still experience down time. A shared hosting provider is just not cut out for the amount of traffic you will get from Digg or Reddit.
WP Super Cache – Ease of Use
If you are not familiar with caching in detail or don’t have the ability to leverage caching technologies such as Memcached, this plugin is perfect for you. WP Super Cache offers an easy setup process, with a simple decision…Off, Half, or Full caching modes. I typically set up my site in Half caching mode, until I need it. Minus that, the setup is pretty simple for the standard blog. It does offer the ability to turn caching off for specific files, which is nice if you load dynamic data into a side bar such as tweets or RSS Feeds.
W3 Total Cache – Fully Customized
The main reason I offer this as a better solution for full customization, is the ability to leverage a Memcached server. Memcached is like normal cache, except it’s a service installed on the server that is specifically designed to serve up highly requested data with minimum load to the database. Memcached offers must more customization and with simply telling W3 Total Cache the IP/Hostname of your Memcached servers, you are done with setup. This is a great solution for someone who has total control over their hosting environment, which most shared hosts do not.
Personally I use the W3 Total Cache plugin. I find much more in tune to the advanced user. If you aren’t sure which one to use, I’d start with WP Super Cache. It’s a great plugin and offers what you are looking for, minimal load on the web server and database. If you need to leverage something like Memcached or are just looking for a more powerful caching plugin, I would suggest W3 Total Cache.
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I love W3 Total Cache. I’m using it on my site.
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