Today we will talk about two WordPress plugins which can speed up your WordPress blog letting it load up fast and help you reduce wordpress server load with your Hosting. Even though, these plugins make your life easy on a shared hosting, they are needed even on a dedicated or Virtual Server too so that your Server performs well, remains stable and your blogs loads lightning fast.
WP Super Cache
It is one of the oldest and best caching plugins available for WordPress blogs which acts as very fast caching engine that produces static html files.
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
This got quite a simple interface for Novice or average users and you shouldn’t be worried about complicated settings. If you are not sure of advance settings, just use the Easy tab, select “Caching ON”. That’s all. You are done.
If you are advance user and you want to customize settings, try the “Advanced” tab. You can play with settings like mod_rewrite, PHP caching, Legacy caching, compression etc.
W3 Total Cache
Its another caching plugin which improves your page loading time and server performance making it more stable and fast. This plugin has got loads of options and it may confuse a novice user. It can integrate content delivery network (CDN) to your WordPress blog making your blog load much faster.
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
Features
- Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
- Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
- Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of objects in memory or on disk
- Minification of posts and pages and feeds
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
- Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
- JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
- Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
W3 total cache provides a complete solution and it can even utilise APC cache, Memcad to improve the server and blog performance. Even if you are on shared hosting, it uses Disk caching .
Out of these two plugins, choose one which you think suits best for you. If you are a average user, you can go for WP Super Cache and if you are advance user, you can try W3 total cache for full caching performance plus benefit of CDN integration.
