I decided to investigate some methods of speeding up page load times on my this blog.
An obvious way to do this seemed to be to add some caching to the site to reduce the load on the MySQL server.
Searching for WordPress caching information gives a lot of references to adding a define('WP_CACHE', true);
line to your wp-config.php file. However this information is now out of date. The WordPress file-based object cache was removed in version 2.5.
I decided on the WP Cache 2.0 plugin which stores the generated pages in /wp-content/cache/ and then serves them to your readers. It does this completetly transparently.
Two questions that I did have about WP Cache before I installed it were:
- Does it work with Google AdSense?
- Will Google Analytics still work?
The answer to both of these questions is yes!
I’ve been using the plugin on my other blog for about a week now with no problems. The speed difference is noticeable but small. You may notice a bigger difference if you have a more popular blog than mine.