WordPress said I needed a caching plugin

high performance comic

I guess that is because more people are visiting me. Or maybe they are just better at detecting I am being hosted at a cheap provider and don’t have one already configured.

The support staff suggested installing LiteSpeed Cache. I installed it and I only had to make one change to turn on the object caching and the two error messages went away. That is nice. GTMetrix the speed testing site I was already fast so I doubt this will make any perceivable difference. I just ran this test now at GTMetrix and it was what I said. It had a very slight 100ms improvement that no one will be able to perceive. It already loads for most people in less than a second, so less than that isn’t noticeable.

I have used many caching plugins and they really are complex and most of the time not worth it for me. I suppose if you were selling something on a website, you would probably want to use a better one but if I did sell something then I would have the most expensive account at my provider which offers a better caching plugin by default. In any event, it is good enough.

WordPress Health usually has useful things to say that help improve performance. This is not an advertisement, but I have learned many things from its suggestions over the years. For beginner WP users it is a wonderful way to learn about WP. I wish that it could do more things like auto-fix the problem like Microsoft used to do. That would be very helpful and user-friendly.

If you want to have the best caching and don’t need multiple servers then use Redis. If you need multiple servers use Memcache. I am using Memcache because my account doesn’t support Redis. It would cost slightly more than twice what I am currently paying and would probably shave a few more hundred ms off the response time.

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Caching plugins are helpful when you need to scale and they have always made my site measurably faster.