Making Your WordPress Blog Run Faster Using WP Super Cache
Today I was wondering how I could make my blog run faster. After searching Google I came across an interesting plugin called WP Super Cache. I decided to download it, install it, and benchmark it to see what kind of impact it would have on actual performance. Through several of my work projects I know that merely loading PHP can have a rather substantial performance on performance (relatively speaking of course). Before installing WP Super Cache, I benchmarked the length of time it took to load 1) My blog homepage and 2) An article I chose at random. These benchmarks represent the time it took for apache to process the php page being requested (not the total download time of the page or part thereof). I downloaded each page five times and took the average.
- Homepage: 0.952s, 0.765s, 1.017s, 1.127s, 1.083s -> Average: 0.9888s
- Single Article: 0.799s, 0.901s, 0.851s, 0.848s, 0.821s -> Average: 0.844s
After installing WP Super Cache the numbers changed to:
- Homepage: 0.804s, 0.733s, 0.791s, 0.778s, 0.738s -> Average: 0.7688s
- Single Article: 0.678s, 0.547s, 0.704s, 0.678s, 0.666s -> Average: 0.6456s
I then installed activated compression (+ cache) and ran stats on just the homepage. This time, page downloading time was factored into the equation in order to see benefits of the compression.
- Homepage: 0.562s, 0.793s, 0.628s, 0.729s, 0.626s -> Average: 0.6676s
Conclusion: Using WP Super Cache decreased the server processing time by about 22%. Enabling compression reduced the total time to download the main page (just html of primary site) by another 13%.
I would have suspected that the difference in processing time would be greater considering that apache just has to retrieve a static HTML page rather than dynamically processing a PHP page. However, I would also suspect the differences to be more significant with a web server under considerable load (which mine is not).
