Super Cache

In this video, I’m gonna show you how to install WP Super Cache. What exactly is WP Super Cache?
Well, basically, all of the content in your WordPress blog is taught in a MySQL database. And every time someone visits your blog, this content is pulled right out of the database and straight to the user.

[evp width=”640″ height=”480″]tutorials/wpvideos/super-cache.swf[/evp]

Now, there’s no problem with this, except that it can cause a lot of strain on your server and also use up a lot of bandwidth. So a smarter way of doing that is to convert those dynamic content pages into static HTML pages.

You can download WP Super Cache from WordPress.org, or you can also search for this plugin within your WordPress dashboard itself.

Now, there are a lot of similar plugins that you can use, but I recommend downloading WP Super Cache and installing it to your WordPress blog. Once you have installed your WP Super Cache plugin, then you just need to activate it.

Okay, so, after you’ve activated the WP Super Cache, you need to go to the plugin admin page to enable caching and to edit some of the configuration settings. And you’ll most probably see a warning message here that looks something like this, that actually tells you the file does not exist or cannot be updated. Now, there are several ways to actually overcome this problem. I’m going to show you the easiest method to do this using your FTP software.

So, using your FTP software, first, you need to connect to your webhost and then click to wp-content folder. Okay, so this is my wp-content folder, and I want to change the file permissions on this, so you just right-click and choose File Permissions, and set this to 777. And then click on OK.

So now let’s refresh this page. Okay, so that earlier issue is solved, but now, there’s a new error message here that says ‘WP_CACHE is not enabled in your wp-config.php file,’ so what we need to do is edit this wp-config file by adding in this small line of code here. So I’m just gonna copy that. And if you know how to edit PHP files using Dreamweaver or a text file editor, then you can do it that way, but I’m gonna show you how to do it using your cPanel account, so you need to log in to your cPanel account, and then go to File Manager.

I’ll click on File Manager, and then I would select the Web Root; click on Show Hidden Files. Okay, so this now opens up the File Manager and I can actually view all the folders and different files in my web hosting account.

Okay, so now, let’s look for the wp-config.php…I’m gonna click on that, and then I’m going to click on the icon here to edit the wp-config file. And now I’ve opened up the wp-config.php file. So it’s very important that you do not make unnecessary changes over here, because this file actually contains your entire WordPress database settings, and you don’t want to mess that up. So the best way to do this is to scroll right to the bottom, and let’s just paste that information over here…okay. So this is the exact code that we got from WP Cache Manager, and you can always get it here, so you can just copy that. Alright, and you can just paste it here.

Okay, so once that’s done, I’m gonna click on Save Changes. Now, let’s refresh this page again. Okay, so that works and you’ll see a warning message here that says ‘Your wp-content folder is writeable!’ because that’s what we did with the FTP program earlier, is to make the entire folder writeable, so you should always change it back to the original settings which is usually 755.

So the first thing you want to do is to turn on Wp Cache and Super Cache. And then let’s just scroll down because this is a really complex plugin, so let’s just scroll down to see if there’s anything we missed out.

Okay, so it says here ‘Mod Rewrite rules cannot be updated!’ Now, if you have already specified a custom URL or URI for your WordPress blog and you have edited your .htaccess file with the Mod Rewrite rules, then you probably will not see this message right here. But in the case of this blog, I have not actually done anything to my .htaccess file. So I can copy this code here and put it into my .htaccess file, or I can just go back to my FTP program, find the .htaccess file on the public_html, and right-click on that, and change the file permissions again to 777. Click OK.

Alright, so let’s just refresh this again, okay.

So now let’s scroll down again and you’ll see under Mod Rewrite Rules now, the entire .htaccess file is here, so you can always click on Update More Rewrite Rules. Alright? So if you have a specific time frame where you want the cache content to expire or be renewed with the latest content, you can just edit that here, which is defined in seconds, or you can just leave that as it is. So if you scroll up, you would see that currently, there is zero cache pages and zero expired pages for both the WP-Cache and the WP-Super-Cache. Okay?

So what happens is that the amount of cached pages will be built up over time as more and more users access different content or different pages on your website. So if you scroll down, then there are of course a lot more settings that you can mess around with, but again, WP Super Cache is a fairly complex plugin that you don’t want to mess around with if you don’t know what you’re doing, so you can just leave those settings as they are.

Now, WP Super Cache is extremely useful for bloggers or WordPress users who experience a spike in traffic probably as a result of being on the first page of Digg or perhaps as a result of launching a new product. So instead of causing your entire WordPress blog to be down and inaccessible, WP Super Cache actually helps you to save a lot of bandwidth by not creating the database every time a user wants to view a specific page. So that will help you to save a lot of bandwidth, and make sure your site is always available.