WordPress Tips for Small Businesses: Part 3 – WP Super Cache

WP Super Caches allows you to create stored images of your website’s pages to allow for quicker serving to your viewers – keeping them happy with lower load times and more time checking out your content and converting them into paying customers at the same time.

To install this plugin, navigate to your plugins page and run a search for “WP Super Cache”. A list of options will appear with a listing similar to the one pictured in this article. Install WP Super Cache just like you would any other plugin. Remember, you have to activate the plugin after installation so that you can use it!

Once you have the Super Cache plugin installed and activated, navigated to the left toolbar under settings, and you should now see WP Super Cache as a new option for you to click on. After you’ve found it, go ahead and click-through to see the new settings area for the plugin.

The first thing we need to do is to make sure that the caching is turned on. By default the plugin is set to turn caching off. To change the setting, click caching on to turn on the cache feature for your website. It’s just that simple! Now, your pages will load faster for your return visitors and get them into your content quicker than before.

Advanced Options

The next thing on our agenda is to click the Advanced tab to look at some of the more complicated features that the plugin has available to us. For the most part, we recommend sticking with all of the default settings, including the setting that says Use PHP to serve cache files. Using PHP to cache your website is the most user-friendly option available to us, and we recommend leaving it that way.

The Miscellaneous section has a few options we need to change to ensure our websites are operating optimally. First, make sure that Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors is checked. You will notice that even though this feature is recommended, it is not automatically turned on from a fresh install of the plugin. Next, we also want to check the Don’t cache pages for known users options. This is needed so that if we are making updates and constantly checking the result we don’t see the cached page instead of the new, updated page.

Next, we have a few changes to make inside the Advanced section. The first item to check off is Mobile Device Support. This is extremely helpful to viewers, on mobile devices obviously, as sometimes poor reception can cause extremely slow loading speeds and a cached page can be served to them much quicker. But, we also want to check Extra homepage checks so that from time to time the mobile device will look for an updated version of your homepage to store in the cache.

The rest of the features are for experienced developers and should not be adjusted unless you are sure you know the consequence of each individual setting.

Plugins

Depending on other plugins you may have installed within your WordPress installation you may choose to implement some of the additional features that WP Super Cache has to offer. If you are running Awaiting Moderation or Bad Behavior, you may wish to turn on the functions that you have available to you.

Short & Sweet!

The setup for this plugin was quick, short and (hopefully) painless! Now, your viewers can view your website and its included pages in record time, getting them to your products and content quicker than ever! When you’re ready, head over to chapter 4 of this guide to learn about two great plugins that protect your WordPress installation from hackers and stop spammers from filling up the comment sections on your site!