One of the most significant issues I have had with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site is that it loaded like a pig (i.e. very slowly), and it frustrated me to no end that I might be losing potential readers because of this, so I have undertaken a small experiment using this site and my finance site to see whether there is a significant difference between WordPress Caching plug-ins or not.
Performance Optimization WordPress Plugins by W3 EDGE
I have a website with WordPress, I am running W3 Total Cache and it seems to be a very “hands-on” caching system with lots of Knobs and Buttons to press if you want. It creates its own “Performance” menu where you can adjust things, and you get a bunch of very useful info about what is going on with the cache and how you might improve your site’s performance. There is also a lot of opportunity to buy services from the Plug-in provider, but I am now happy with what I see (after a week of running).
On installation, I’d say it was pretty straightforward forward didn’t seem to create too much excitement. Still, all of the caching plug-ins have their own little “issues” with specific files in your WP-CONTENT directory or the actual CACHE directory they are proposing to use. This is not something for a WordPress Neophyte to try, but I was OK with it (I view myself at the informed twiddler level).
There are plenty of metrics, including Google Page Speed analysis capabilities which are helpful to have (and can’t hurt in terms of Google getting more info about your site). If you look at the Google Pagespeed insights page, this site gets rated 78 out of 100 with issues with Server Response Time and other matters. This seems OK. However not as good as I had hoped.
WordPress Super Cache
This plug-in caching system is being run on The Canadian Personal Finance Site, and it seems to be making the site much quicker than it has been. Running and using this plug-in is fine for folks who don’t get too scared by WordPress, and it is also installed OK. However, it needed to have a specific file moved to be fully functional. I had to use an FTP client to move things around but it did seem to start with no problem after this slight adjustment.
There is a set of useful menus that are pretty easy to navigate, and in fact, you can stay on the “EASY” menu and make the whole thing work without becoming too much of a wizard on things.
So far, this seems to be helping speed up the site a great deal, with Google Page Speed saying the home page is now a 94 out of 100 in terms of speed (it was much lower before I installed the Plug-in). I suspect this might be the right choice for the site I am using the PHP caching level (not quite the fastest, but almost), and I will continue to monitor the performance week by week.
I am also interested in any opinions from my readers (in the comments).
I am using W3TC. It is great but time to time breaks my blog as I keep experimenting with the site. I shall be trying it with interactive php soon. So far it is very promising.
It is hard to improve the server response time if you are using a regular rig and have a firewall running. I also run some more security mods and they tend to slow it down a bit. It is better to be safe than a sorry a….
Also frequent DNS lookups slows the server down. You may want to cut that.
The 3rd party scripts are the worst culprits to drag the site speed down.
Did you try to use any CDN? Let me know please. They all appear to be very expensive and in most of the cases you have to transfer the Name server to them – that idea – I am not very comfy with.
Not going to worry about the CDN for now, I am happy enough with the response currently, although I will monitor things a little more closely in the fall when folks come back to the Internet ;-).