Wordpress has become a very popular blogging application for many of our users at Lunarpages. On occasion, we have come across instances where this script has lead to very high load levels due to how dynamic it is. This is especially true with the automatically generated rss feeds.

Recently, the WP-Cache plugin for Wordpress was brought to my attention by the webmaster of quarkvsindesign.com. We were both looking for a solution to help resolve the high levels of usage on that site and this plugin seems to have done the trick. At the very least this plugin will reduce how often your database is queried, thus decreasing page load times, but for active sites this will actually make your Wordpress site far more friendly for our shared servers!

Below I have detailed the steps I took to install WP-Cache on my own Wordpress installation. If you are using Wordpress for your blog, give this a shot as it is a great plugin for both yourself and your fellow Lunarpages users!

1) Download the WP-Cache plugin from http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/.

2) Upload the contents to the following directory within your wordpress installation: wp-content/plugins

3) Unzip the WP-Cache file. You can do this using File Manager in your cPanel.

4) Login to your Wordpress administration panel.

5) Disable gzip compression by going to Options > Reading and making sure that the "WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them" box is unchecked and click Update Options.

6) Go to the "Plugins" menu and click "Activate" for WP-Cache.

7) Go to the Options > WP-Cache page and click "Enable." This will enable the cache on your page.

Thats it! Now your pages will be cached when they are loaded and only generate once every x seconds (where x is the number of seconds defined in the WP-Cache config page). You can view the source of your document and at the very end there is an HTML comment that will tell you how long it took to parse originally and whether or not you are viewing a cached, or live page.