Slow MySQL For Wordpress? Use WP-Cache

Website: WP-Cache

No matter how good dynamic pages are, they’ll always be slower than static web pages. When a person accesses a file like .htm or .html, the web address directs the viewer directly to that page. When you page is dynamic, such as pages in a MySQL based blog – like Wordpress, the address leads to a database query. So first the page has code that connects to a database, queries the page, and then displays them onto the screen.

There’s no doubt that dynamic content management systems save time and effort. However, accessing pages could be a bit slower. This delay depends on what host you have and host much demand is on your host.

In my situation, I’ll admit that my hosting company isn’t the fastest for MySQL. There were times when it would take a few seconds to load a dynamic page. I couldn’t bare it myself.

So I started to use WP-Cache. It’s a great plugin for Wordpress and it’s free. It will cache your pages. These cached pages are saved on your server, so Wordpress doesn’t have to query the whole page from the database. So now Wordpress page-access times are greatly reduced.

There are a variety of options you have. You can set the length of time that you want to cache, set you filters for pages you don’t want cached, manually clear your cache and more.

The only issue I’ve had is with a plugin called Captcha! It allows you to reduce spam by requiring a security code before submitting a comment. It was a great plugin, but I recently discovered that it didn’t work well with WP-Cache. The security code was on an image, and it would be cached like everything else. What this means is that the code was changing internally, but the image wouldn’t be updated.

However, I’ve found something similar that has been working well. It’s called WordVerify. Although not as great, it does it’s job.