I was over at Simon’s and reading his post on ‘How to speedup your WordPress blog loading time’ and it reminded me of something. I had to turn on caching on my own blog. WordPress caching is useful for dramatically reducing load times of your WordPress blogs. What caching really does is that it creates and stores a ‘ghost’ image of your blog on your visitors’ browsers. Caching is useful and recommended in the following scenarios:

• Noticeable lags and increase in load times due to huge database activity/queries (especially common in huge blogs will numerous posts).
• Too many javascripts running in the background thus affecting load time.
• Your hosting provider informs you that your blog is exceeding the server load limits for you hosting plan.

Caching on websites are largely not encourage for a simple reason. Visitors see the old ‘ghost’ image they saw yesterday when they visit your site the next day. Unless they clear the cache of their browsers, updates may not appear on they browsers even though you are sure that you have made the updates. With pinging capabilities, these errors have been eliminated on blogs.

I’m not sure as I have done little research on this but my gut tells me that the performance of geo-targeting, advertising and other codes of the same nature running on javascripts may be affected with caching turned on.

If you prefer to use a plugin for WordPress for advanced caching instead of messing around with your wp-config.php file, My suggestion is to use the WP-Cache plugin. I run this on my server too. I have to agree that caching does put the kick back into your WordPress blog with significant improvements.

Corrinne May - Beautiful Seed - Love Song for #1