WP Super Cache to Speed up WordPress

July 05, 2012 | Written by Ed Andrea

Everyone is concerned about the speed of their website for at least two important reasons:

Search engines now take page speed into account when ranking.
People are increasingly using mobile phones and slow pages become even slower on phones.

One way to make your WordPress site run faster is with cache. WP Super Cache is just about the best cache plugin around.

This tutorial is a brief introduction to WP Super Cache that will help install and use the plugin.

Video on How to Use WP Super Cache

Step 1: Installation

You can download and install WP Super Cache by going to Plugins > Add New and searching for it by name.
Install it and activate the plugin.
If you see the warning in the image below, just click the link.

At this point you will be asked to set up permalinks if you haven't already got custom permalinks selected.
Just choose anything but the default setting. When you click the radio button, for example Post Name, it automatically fills in the custom structure.

Step 2: Basic WP Super Cache Settings

Go to Settings > WP Super Cache.
Go to the Easy tab.
Select Caching on.
Click Update Status.
Click Test Cache.

Step 3: Test cache

If everything comes up OK, your done with the basic setup. I only have two pages on the test site. You may have a lot more. But this is all you need to do to install and activate the plugin.

Below we'll describe some of the other features that intermediate to advanced users will want to know about.

Advanced Settings

Under the other tabs you will find a lot of other settings. You're going to need to take some time considering and testing these. The most important item is caching method at the top. The rest are optional.

If you want to learn more about these you'll need to read the FAQ's and become familiar with their support forum. While simply installing it can make a difference, there are many settings for making improvements.

CDN

CDN stands for Content Distribution Network. A CDN solves the problem of hosting your website in only one part of the world:

• If your server is in the U.S.A., it's going to load much more slowly for visitors from Australia
• If your server is in Germany, your visitors from India are going to be waiting a long time.

CDNs solve that problem by hosting your content on multiple servers around the world. The client accesses the copy of the data that is nearest to them instead of pulling it directly from your central server. This speeds up load time and eliminates bottlenecks!

This tab shows you what's currently cached on your site:

Preload

This option will cache every published post and page on your site. It will create supercache static files so unknown visitors (including bots) will hit a cached page. This will probably help your Google ranking as they are using speed as a metric when judging websites now. This is also something you need to study before you implement it. You may not want all your PHP pages to be cached. There are two remaining tabs, Plugins and Debug, but these aren't really useful to any but the most advanced users.

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