Day three: Application optimization or what plugin we should use to optimize the performance of our WordPress website

cover image for Day three: Application optimization or what plugin we should use to optimize the performance of our WordPress website
Application optimization otherwise said: what plugin we should use to optimize the performance of our WordPress website?

WordPress pages are dynamically built. This means that they are built every time someone visits a post or a page on your website or almost any other content on your website.

For WordPress to “build” your web page, the platform have to run a series of PHP and MySQL processes to gather the required information, construct a web page with this information and then display it to the end user or with other words said your website visitor.

This is quite the complex process for the non-developers which includes a lot of steps. Such process could really slow down the loading of your website when multiple people are browsing it at once.

This is why we recommend every WordPress website to use a caching plugin. A good caching solution such as WPCacheOn will make your WordPress website anywhere from two to five times faster.

Rather than going through the whole page generation process every time, WPCacheOn makes a copy of the page with our brand new PreCache system, then serves that cached version to every user of your website. You can see this in the following graphic as well:

image showing how WPCacheOn makes your website loading faster
We don’t know if life is better with cache but WordPress surely is better with WPCacheOn.

As you can see in the above graphic, when someone visits your WordPress based website, the server start retrieving information from the MySQL database and the PHP files. Then it is all put together into HTML content which is rendered in the user’s browser. As you can now understand this is a long process. The good news is that with WPCacheOn this process is cut down to only user accessing your website. Then the website is instantly loaded in to the user’s browser.

For our birthday we have performed many modifications over the WPCacheOn plugin. The biggest and most noticeable new feature is our brand new PreCache system. Right after activating WPCacheOn the PreCache system start to cache all of your website pages. With the other cache plugins web page is cached only when it is accessed. This means that the first time a user access your website the page is not cached and it is loading slow. We have removed this tedious slow first loading with the PreCache feature. As soon as WPCacheOn preload all of the pages, even if the page is accessed for the first time it will load faster from the already generated cache.

You can see more details about the processes of loading web page and how WPCacheOn optimize your website performance in the WPCacheOn Features page.

Check out our step by step guide on how to install and activate WPCacheOn on your WordPress site. It is very easy to setup and your website visitors will notice the difference immediately.

Many WordPress hosting companies offer custom caching solutions as well. It is always a good idea to ask your host if they have built-in tool in their control panel to optimize your WordPress website.

Are you using WPCacheOn? Are you using another cache plugin? Share with us your experience with WordPress cache plugins in the comments.

With that being said we can proceed to our next WordPress optimization theme – “Post revisions, pingbacks and trackbacks – how they affect our website speed and do we need them” which you will see tomorrow. If you have missed any of our previous optimization talks, feel free to check them, so far they are about choosing the right web hosting provider and how to optimize your website database.