Thu Sep 22 17:44:24 EEST 2011

Two wordpress plugins to accelerate wordpress opening times and decrease server load time

A combination of two wordpress caching plugins (Hyper Cache and Db Cachesignificantly improves the access times of a wordpress based blogs and websites.

Installing the two websites has drastically improved my blog opening times, so in my view having the two plugins on every wordpress install out there is a must! :)
The plugins installation is straight forward, here is how I installed them.

1. Installing Hyper Cache on Wordpress

To install Hyper Cache all I had to do is download and enable the plugin, the plugin doesn't require any configuration. I always love it when I don't have to bother with reading configuration options and pondering for some 20 minutes on the plugin features, so in that perspective Hyper Cache in my view is a good alternative to Wordpress Super Cache

Besides that Wordpress Super Cache was having issues when enabled on few wordpress based websites I manage these days. For comparison Hyper Cache worked just great on all wordpress install I tried the plugin so far.

To install all I had to do is download the plugin unzip and enable it:

a. Download and unzip it

debian:/var/www/blog# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/hyper-cache.zip
...
debian:/var/www/blog# cd wp-content/plugins
debian:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip hyper-cache.zip


b. Enable Hyper Cache plugin

To enable the plugin follow to standard plugin location;

Plugins -> Inactive -> Hyper Cache (Enable)


A Let me proceed with how I did the install of Db Cache .

a. Download and Install Db Cache br />
debian:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/db-cache.0.6.zip
...
debian:/var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins# unzip db-cache.0.6.zip


b. Enable the plugin

Plugins -> Inactive -> Db Cache (Enable)


c. Make sure the permissions for Db Cache are correct

On Debian to enable Db Cache, the permissions should be changed for Apache to have a read/write permissions to plugin directory, on Debian to fix the permissions I used the commands:

debian:/var/www/blog# chown www-data:www-data wp-content/
debian:/var/www/blog# chown -R www-data:www-data wp-content/plugins/db-cache


On other GNU/Linux distributions the above commands (user and group) www-data:www-data , should be set to whatever user/group Apache is running with, on Slackware this would be nobody:nobody , on CentOS and RHEL it would be apache:apache .

Finally to enable Db Cache