One vital aspect of SEO is the speed of your site. Google do take note of it. So you want your WordPress blog to be as fast as it can be. However, some speed tools can be very technical to set up.
PriMoThemes Quick Cache isn’t one of them. It requires that you do two things to get it working:
1. Download and install the plugin (at the time of writing, Quick Cache comes up first when you search for “cache” in the Plugins search box);
2. Go to Config Options under Quick Cache, select “On (Enabled)” under Caching Enabled, and save your changes at the bottom of the screen.
That’s it!
Now for my test results. I have been working with WP Super Cache in the main, but I did run into some space issues with it; also it is a little harder to set up than Quick Cache. Quick Cache has options that allow you to control its behaviour, but there are not many such options, so it’s ideal if you just want to drop something in for a quick speed boost. Also, Quick Cache does not need access to your .htaccess file, unless you want to enable compression.
During three tests, Pingdom Tools reported 2.7, 2.7 and 3.7 seconds to load the home page. (This is using shared hosting for these tests.) The last tests that I ran without a cache enabled reported 3.11, 3.24 and 3.07 seconds. So on the whole, it may be that the cache improves speed by about 10% on a shared hosting server. That’s a very worthwhile saving!
One of the down sides is that compression is not enabled out of the box, which can help with both speed and bandwidth costs. To get that working, you must edit your .htaccess file, if you have one.
Quick Cache also provides an info screen that provides comprehensive documentation for it and the box it is running on, so that should help you to diagnose problems.
Quick Cache will clean up your expired cache files at the end of the run.
The one thing you have to be aware of is that all cache plugins use disk space. If you are using shared hosting with a limited amount of storage space, be careful, as you may end up running out of disk space completely. This plugin is not the only one that will use up all your disk space if you let it! The same problem unfortunately applies to most backup plugins.
So, on the whole, it’s simple; practically a drop-in plugin. It’s also free, so try it! What have you got to lose?
