Setup up caching on WordPress

WordPress is a dynamic platform, which means that the pages of your WordPress website are generated each time a visitors hits a page. This creates more workload for the server, as every visitor is generating each page of the website in real-time.

In most cases, the website content is not changed from moment to moment, but rather updated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

So to help reduce the server workload and speed up the website, caching is essential.

What does caching do?

Caching generates the pages and saves them as static content, in the form of HTML files. So rather than generating the pages separately for every visitor, the static html file is loaded, if available. This is a lot less workload for the server, and therefore much faster for the visitor.

How to enable caching on WordPress?

For Eggplant Digital customers, we recommend installing and using WP Super Cache. Our servers are setup for this, so it is simple to get started.

1) Log into your WordPress site, go to Plugins > Add New > Search for WP Super Cache.

2) Install and Activate WP Super Cache.

3) Once activated, go to Settings > WP Super Cache in the side bar.

4) Then you can enable by selecting “Caching On”.

5) Next, head over to the Advanced tab.

– Turn on “Expert”, and switch on the follow recommended settings:

• Disable caching for logged in visitors. (Recommended)
• Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors. (Recommended)
• Cache rebuild. Serve a supercache file to anonymous users while a new file is being generated. (Recommended)
• 304 Browser caching. Improves site performance by checking if the page has changed since the browser last requested it. (Recommended)

Go down and click “Update Status”

6) Open your website homepage in an incognito window, now “view source” of the website, which will give you the HTML code. Scroll down to the bottom of the code and you should see, with the current date and time.

<!-- Dynamic page generated in 0.960 seconds. -->
<!-- Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2022-07-07 23:11:10 -->
<!-- Compression = gzip -->

This indicates you are seeing a cached version of the page, if you refresh, the timestamp should stay the same, as this is a static HTML version of your page.

If you are confused, log into your account and contact eggplant support team.