I’ve been using WP-Cache for a few days now and I’m impressed with the difference it’s making. I’m on a shared service here, so I don’t really have access to server stats for load analysis, but just the fact that the user experience browsing my site has improved so much is just awesome!
Before my experience, I wouldn’t have recommended installing caching plugins unless you’re receiving substantial traffic (not that I don’t like plugins), but I’m currently rolling it out to any blogs I have that get even 100 page hits a day (just rolled it out to AskOwen). It’s not like I’m listing the list of best diet pills and expecting 1000s of page hits an hour, but I do get a lot of traffic from bots trying to leave spam on the site. Most of those hits tend to be on the home page, so even if a few of those get served out of a cache, it still have a knock-on effect on browsing experience.
My three words to success this week are going to have to be “cache .. cache .. cache”
WP Super Cache is also excellent. WordPress is very nice but it really is very bad in using tons of server resources with very little traffic. Bad-Behavior is also good – it stops bots… from using up your servers resources.
As much as I love WordPress as a Blogging Platform it’s relentless usage of server resources is a silent killer for many. A previous Blog I had hosted for a client was removed by the host because of the strain it put on the shared server it was running on.
WP-Cache is a fantastic plug-in that I would even argue should be a default in the next version of WP. WP-Super-Cache and Bad Behavior are also great plug-ins, although I’ve never needed to use them on any Blog’s that I own.