Even though this word may not seem new to most of the internet users especially webmasters, let’s start by explaining what caching is for what it is worth. Every time you want to log onto a site or a blog, there is a long process that takes place. The blog first processes the php code and makes many calls to the database before displaying the HTML output on the browser for the visitor to see. This process can slow down the loading of a page significantly and this is where caching comes in. In caching, the first visitor goes through this rigorous process and the caching mechanism saves the data so that subsequent visitors will access only the final output. This increases the speed of your site significantly.
How exactly does caching take place you may ask. You can make use of the numerous plugins available or cache your pages manually. This article highlights on some of the best caching plugins as well as the manual caching of a page.
One of the plugins you can use the WP-Cache plugin. It is a simple plugin that has been around for a while. It is very easy to install but falls short in not cleaning up its mess after caching and creating a few files outside the directory. An upgraded version of this plug-in is the WP Super Cache which is very popular among WordPress users. It is also easy to install and uninstall and it cleans up its mess on deactivating. It has many options and but it needs you to create a proper .htaccess file and follow directions carefully. You should also be careful when enabling WP Super Cache compression especially if your browser has this option enabled or if it does not support this option.
The WP Widget Cache is a plug-in made especially for people with heavy widget use on their blog. It is recommended for running against other plugins and is easy to install and uninstall. It is especially helpful to people using many widgets and it also caches the widgets. The DB Cache plug-in is more specialized in that it saves the database queries instead of the pages. It is available in many languages and has a simple user interface. The DB Cache reloaded is an updated version of the DB Cache plug-in with similar but updated features. The Hyper Cache is a new plug-in for blogs hosted on shared servers while the W3 Total Cache is a super cache with numerous configurations packed in it. It is easy to install and good for people who do not want to customize it but it takes a lot of disk space.
Instead of relying on plugins, you can cache your own blog manually especially if you have high traffic static pages, to do this, you go to your wp-content folder and create a folder named cache. You then visit the blog page you want to cache, view the source and copy the entire source into a relevant file after which you create a .htaccess file. You can also consider combining plugins.
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