Speed Up WordPress on Shared or Cheap Hosting With Hyper Cache

A little while back we posted an article about how to Maximize WordPress and BuddyPress Performance With W3 Total Cache. If you’re new to WordPress caching, you can catch up on the basics by reading that one. W3 Total Cache operates at peak performance when you have the available server resources to utilize memory caching as opposed to the simple disk caching. It’s also a great all-in-one solution for integrating CDN. But what about simple WordPress blogs that operate on cheap or shared hosting with limited resources?

Hyper Cache: The Poor Man’s Ticket to a Speedy WordPress

Hyper Cache was specifically written for people who have their blogs on a low resources hosting provider, particularly CPU and mySQL. Here’s how it works:

On each request, the cache engine is called by WordPress. It checks if the html for this request is in cache and is still valid. If so the html page is returned and everything stops. WordPress calls the cache engine BEFORE any other kind of operations, so not plugins are activated, no database connection established, no queries executed. If the page requested is not in cache, the cache engine “capture” the html produced by WordPress and put it on file.

Hyper Cache Features:

• Compatible with the plugin wp-pda which enables a blog to be accessible from mobile devices
• Manages (both) plain and gzip compressed pages
• Autoclean system to reduce the disk usage
• 404 caching
• Redirects caching
• Easy to configure
• Global Translator compatibility
• Last Modified http header compatibility with 304 responses
• Compressed storage to reduce the disk space usage agents, urls and cookies based rejection configurable easy to integrated with other plugins

It even works with hosting based on Microsoft IIS with a little bit of tuning. AdSense, Analytics, and any other service delivered by JavaScript will not be affected by Hyper Cache. Recent Apache Benchmark tests rank Hyper Cache as the best WordPress caching plugin when combined with DB Cache Reloaded. Check out a full WordPress caching plugins review at Tutorial9.net to see the details of how it measures up to other WordPress caching options.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog on shared or cheap hosting, go ahead and give this caching option a try. When installing, make sure that your /wp-content directory is writeable, so that it can create the advanced-cache.php file. If the directory isn’t writeable the plugin will fail to install.

Hyper Cache is a very lightweight caching option for the average WordPress blog, offering speed without a lot of overhead. For more information on the plugin’s features, configuration, and support, please visit the Hyper Cache homepage.

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