A savvy website owner understand how important it is to have a website with a quick loading time. If you run your website on WordPress, you’ve heard of caching plugins.
Caching is an effective way to ensure your website loads faster for your visitors. But for optimal performance, your website should alert browsers on the exact content they need to cache. Unfortunately, caching plugins don’t allow you to have full control over these settings, so you need to configure them manually.
WordPress has a ton of cache plugins in the market, but WP Super Cache Plugin and W3 Total Cache (W3TC) are the most popular. The only difference between the two plugins is: WP cache is easy to install and configure whereas W3TC have a variety of options with an extensive configuration process.
When your website is sluggish due to WordPress PHP scripts, Cache plugin produces static HTML files to solve this problem. As a result, your website’s load time increases thus improving site optimization and user experience.
In this article, we will look at how to configure WP Super Cache on word press?
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Download and Install WP Super Cache
The first step is to download and successfully install WordPress Cache plugin on your computer. Visit the official Plugin page and download its package.
Or simply login to the admin area on your WordPress.
On the drop menu, press Plugins and click Add New on the top of your page.
In the Search Plugins spot enter WP Super Cache and click Enter
The first thing that pops up on will be WP Super Cache plugin. Hit Install button to start the installation process.
Once the plugin is installed, click Activate Plugin
NOTE: It is recommended that all other caching plugins are disabled. You can deactivate any other plugin by going to the Plugins section and press Deactivate button just below the plugin.
Step 2: Initial Configuration of the Cache Plugin
By now you have successfully installed the plugin. Once you activate the plugin, you get a message like this:
Click on the hyperlink (plugin admin page) that appears on this page to go to the plugin setting page. If you get a message saying a permalink structure is required for the plugin to work properly, navigate to Settings > Permalinks on the WP dashboard and select any option other than the first one. In this guide, I have chosen the Numeric Permalink option.
Now we’ve got everything we need, let’s proceed to open the setting panel on the WP Cache plugin. Head over to Settings > WP Super Cache. At this point, you will see a yellow box bearing this message:
That’s okay. But the yellow box shouldn’t come up every time you start the WP Super Cache setting. It should pop up only once. If it comes up every time, look for the FAQ link. On the setting panel, click WP Super Cache then Easy section. You will notice that Caching is disabled. Turn the Caching on and click update status.
On turning on the cache, hit the Test Cache button to check if it’s working. WordPress Super Cache will collect data from your WordPress twice and compare the time prints of both pages. If they match, then it means the caching is working properly on your site.
If you plan to increase your WordPress site performance even further, explore the advanced settings of WP Super Cache.
Step 3: WP Super Cache Advanced Set up
The WP Super Cache plugin comes with advanced options for extra WordPress Optimization and increased loading speed. To get to the advanced options, head over to Settings > WP Super Cache then hit the Advanced Tab button.
How to Enable Caching
To start off, check the box as shown above from the top. Since WP Super Cache makes use of PHP to attend to cache files, it becomes expensive to maintain especially when it’s on a shared hosting space. So, it is recommended that you try to use mod rewrote to serve the cache files. Once you’re done, scroll done and click Update Status button to save the changes. You should see a yellow box with this text:
These settings are simply meant for your server’s file known as .htaccess. Scroll down until you find the button below:
If the modification process was successful, your .htaccess file should appear in form of a green box:
Now proceed to configuring the plugin’s Preload Tab.
Step 4: WP Super Cache Preload Set-up
The preload set-up allows for interval caching of all the site’s posts and pages. You can set it automatically. For shared hosting, it is recommended to set it once a day (1440 minutes). If you do site updates twice a day, you can set your time interval between every cache refresh to 720 minutes. For the second option, it means you will refresh the site per day which may need additional server load. So, it is recommended that you avoid using a lower value, especially in shared hosting environments.
On the other hand, if you’re using a dedicated server, you can lower the refresh interval to 60 minutes. The optimum refresh time on a site that receives high traffic would be two hours.
In this case, we have checked the cache refresh interval to 1440 minutes, but you’re free to include a value that fits your needs.
Hit the Update Settings button to save the changes. If you want to start the caching process immediately, hit the Preload Cache Now button after updating the settings. The process of preload cache set up requires time and resources depending on the site’s posts and pages, so give it some time to complete.
Now the WP Super Cache is completely configured, but you can do a test to confirm. Go to Easy setting tab, hit the Test Cache button. If the cache plugin is configured, you should see this message:
You’ve successfully configured caching in your WordPress. It should load faster now.
Conclusion
Now that you know how WP caching plugin works and how you can increase site performance, it’s time to try it out. We hope this guide will help you install and configure WP-Cache plugin on your WordPress site.
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