WP Super Cache Plugin. A Must Have Pluging For WordPress Bloggers
I recently had a lot of spam drama on my blog. It explained why my blog has been so slow! I met Vlad years ago as an affiliate marketer. Then I found him again on Twitter. He has been key in helping me get rid of the spam problem and helping with other parts of my blog. He has been invaluable.
I learned two things: always upgrade your blog to the most recent version. And monitor your site by adding a Google alert like this one site:newspapergrl.com viagra OR cialis OR levitra
One thing Vlad did after securing my blog is to optimize my WP Super Cache Plugin. I asked him to write an instructive post about what he did.
In Vlad’s words:
I absolutely love this plugin. The plugin author has written a very in-depth overview of what this plugin was designed to do. It helps your blog load faster and handle higher traffic loads. Countless bloggers have written about it and how it helped to keep their servers intact when unexpected waves of Digg traffic roll in. While I’ve never had my posts featured on the front page of Digg, I do receive a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon.
The first time I realized I might need the plugin was the time I started to think I might need a dedicated host to handle the increase in traffic to my blog. Currently the websites (10+) I operate all are hosted on a shared account. Most of them are powered by WordPress. And as much as I love WordPress, it can put some heavy loads on the server.
One day instead of your website you might see an error message from your host saying following “this accounts has been suspended, please contact your web hosting provider immediately.” I would have never seen this massage had I installed WP Cache Plugin as one of my first plugins. I was ready to buy more space and WP Super Cache saved me from having to do that.
So what does WP Super Cache do?
It replicates the pages of your blog and saves them as HTML files. And instead of serving your pages to your visitors through PHP scripts, it serves them as plain old HTML files, practically eliminating sever load. If visitors to your blog do not leave comments on your blog (about 90% + of visitors), the pages will never be served via PHP to them.
Originally this plugin was designed to survive traffic from websites like Digg. I do however believe that this plugin should be highly recommended by shared web hosting providers, and even “enforced” by those web hosts that tend to oversell their servers.
Important things to remember when istalling this plugin.
WP Super Cache plugin belongs to those plugins that require extra attention. Besides installing and activating the plugin, you actually need to turn plugin on via it’s own settings:
It is important that you choose the custom (aka as “pretty”) permalinks setting in your blog as WP Super Cache will not work with “ugly” permalinks, if you have not done so already.
Finally, WP Super Cache will ask you to update the .htaccess file. If you have modified your file already, it would be a good idea to back up that file and/or manually insert the necessary code provided in the WP Super Cache plugin settings page.
Finally to assure that plugin is working properly, you need to view the source of any of the pages of your blog. Look for the following code found at the very end:
If it’s there, your WP Super Cache is working, and is or will be saving your some cash. Remember to share your blessing with the developer of this plugin. 
Vlad Zablotskyy can be found blogging at SageBlogger.com, Go Beyond MLS and Vlad Zablotskyy Interpreting LLC.
Thanks Vlad for this helpful instruction! Next I’d love to get a guest post about Stumbled Upon.
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March 5th, 2009 at 10:56 am
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