For the past few months I have been using the WordPress plugin WP Super Cache on this website, and was rather disappointed with it’s performance.
Several revisions ago, the plugin was cumbersome and bulky, with lots of options I didn’t really understand. Eventually they released an updated version that separated the options into Easy and Advanced categories, which was a good decision.
However, I began noticing that performance was starting to decrease on my site. Look at this totally awesome chart:
Page Speed
Now I know there are fluctuations since the load on the server is different all the time, as well as other variables, but you can see a rising trend until Mid-November.
Google has started to incorporate Page Load Time into their ranking algorithm that determines how your site is placed in search results. With at the high point my site taking 30 seconds + to load, you can imagine it negatively impacted the amount of traffic I was receiving.
In Early December I installed a plugin called W3 Total Cache and it improved my performance drastically. With Page Load Times decreased, I am receiving more traffic, better Search Engine ranking, and my visitors are not as annoyed by the long waits before they can experience what I have expertly crafted with my fingertips on this very page.
The options in W3 Total Cache are a lot more simple, and the site is noticeably faster as well. If you have a WordPress site and are looking for a good, reliable, easy to use caching system, I would highly recommend W3 Total Cache as the best caching plugin available.
Nice plug-in. it is really helpful on blogs which are containing pictures. thanks for shearing this tools with us…
I use W3 Total Cache on most of the wordpress sites I do. Haven’t found anything better so far. Can I ask where you got your chart from?
It is from the labs section of Google Webmaster Tools. There are a lot of other useful tools, but the site load time section is still in development, I suspect it will be more detailed once it is fully released.
Thanks. For some reason I had overlooked the ‘labs’ section.
Slower Load Time is not the necessary. It depends on the way you customise it.
I wrote this article to disagree, I tried changing the various options and never got it to work right.
I’ve been using this plugin for about a year now, never noticed any speed issues myself.
I also use this plugin for a couple of years and I never have any problems even with very popular websites.
Seems odd that WordPress don’t come with good query caching as standard, though good that W3 Total Cache does the trick.
(Though it should be noted that slow loading times are usually down to a bad server set up)