2 Best Cache Plugins Combination for WP sites on Shared Hosting

No doubt, shared server hosting is the way to go for blogs and small business websites! Just the way we usually advice e-commerce business website owners to go for dedicated plans in order to achieve better and improved speed, we also insist on caching for blogs that are currently hosted on a shared server.

Shared server hosting have got really numerous advantages that has made it to retain it’s position as the most proper hosting solution for %89 of websites out there, It is usually cheaper and does not involve Linux administration skills at all.

This is while we decided to look further into how we can achieve maximum speed and better usability even while using the shared hosting environment for our website and blogs by caching the static pages and files.

The Importance of Caching a WordPress Site :

I thought it good enough coughing out few seconds to explain what caching a wordpress site can do for you. It does not really matter if your blog is hosted on a shared or dedicated server, without caching it, the C.P.U will surfer and you could also be loosing good amount of visitors who doesn’t like waiting too long for your site to fully load.

Caching a wordpress CMS powered website or blog keeps it from having to create a new page every time a new visitor loads a page. The page is usually created once by these wp caching plugins and held onto (or cached) for a period of time (usually specified) activated by the user. This will in turn improve your website by serving the cached page to subsequent visitors till the time specified expires and triggers a new cached version of the website.

The importance should be very obvious now knowing that the server is prevented from having to check the database and assemble the page from scratch.

How can we Combine one or Two Caching Plugins to achieve a “Speed of Light” on a shared server Hosted Wp Blog?

Practically not all wordpress caching plugins can be combined, else you might end up getting the undesired result, since we are majorly concerned about speed and not triggering our host to kick our ass outta the cheap & limited server we are consuming for the others, here  are surefire caching plugins combination that will fire up your website  or blog.

Recently I got contacted via freelancer.com by a newbie entertainment blogger whose ass has been seriously kicked by his hosting company (Hostgator)  twice in a row for firing up the load on the shared server hosting account she was using for her already very popular blog, this forced her to move up a little to a level 3 VPS hosting account upgrade but that didn’t turn out to be the messiah she was looking for.

When we had a brief chat, I told her the issue could be resolved by the use of a caching plugins, Personally I am no fan of  W3 Total Cache and so asked her to look up for review on the internet to finally arrive at a bid that will enable me do proper configuration on her site.

After 12hrs of intensive research and questioning  she stumbled upon one of the best documentation of wordpress caching on the internet, that by  Kyle Robinson Young of  tutorial9.net and so asked me to go ahead with his final recommendation. After setting all that up for her together with improving her manual wordpress cron job handling, events handling and theme optimization, the site speed did not only improve but has remained up and running till date without having any high server load issues with her hosting provider.

#1.

Hyper Cache Extended combined with DB Cache Reloaded Fix

Believe me when I say that this very combination is one sure messiah and live saver for every wordpress blog or website hosted on low cost shared servers, this is because the speed is optimum as opposed to what you will end up getting if you decide to go with the big guns out there while using a low cost shared server.

WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache has over the years lived up to it’s reputation but never loved some of us who are managing the “low cost shared hosting environment” as it’s compression options has only succeeded in triggering high memory usage on the little fair usage average memory resources attributed to our little space. This will not only force our host to raise the eyebrows but will even make our site to see little or no improvement at all.

If you are very desperate for “speed of light” load time and less-server resources consumption for your blog and websites, you will either go for a dedicated server hosting plan and cruise alongside with you “the W3 Total Cache plugin” or stick with my advice of combining “hyper cache extended plugin” and “db reloaded fix plugin”

Bonus Read : The biggest player in this very combination is the Hyper Cache Extended plugin meaning that using it all alone wouldn’t hurt your site at all but improves it to a maximally optimum and noticeable performance rate. You should also remove the “db cache reloaded fix plugin” if you notice any bug, internal server error or stick with the father alone, ‘cos it’s all okay by itself if not that they they both carry out distinctive functions.

#2

Quick Cache combined with WP Widget Cache

This will rescue the asses of most shared hosting users out there who has been wiped by their host for high server resources consumption  as it will not cache your dynamic files but will also cache the various active widgets in your blog thereby delivering a kinda static pages to thousands of visitors per-minute.

One good thing about this two plugins is that it requires no advanced configuration just like the two already listed above, all you need do is tap the off and on buttons, setting up the time-frame for your various caching on the go.

Many opinions already alleges that the “quick cache plugins” contribution to speed and performance is minimal when compared with the big players out there, that could be true only when you have not added the child “wp widget cache plugin” to the van.

Bonus Read: No bug, error messages and the likes has ever been heard of while using this two plugins together, but as a matter of respect, other person’s view and our personal discretion it is required of you to make your choice between this two combinations only when you must have tested the different options with the perfect page testing tool accessible from pingdom.com

Bonus Combination for Performance on shared server

We wanted to make little more viable suggestion for improving your wordpress sites hosted on the shared hosting environment with this wonderfully performing plugins below.

CloudFlare combined with Better WordPress Minify

If optimum performance is your goal, security and speed of light load time a concern to you, locating this two plugins would have been the first thing you should have done from the very start.

Premium solutions like Max CDN and the CDN solution provided by Amazon works great but wouldn’t be a concern to you on a shared server ‘cos they usually cost lots of money which you may not have at the moment.

We assumed that the money would have been spent for a better server assuming you already have it, this is why we are recommending cloudflare for many of you that are ready to do something better for their blog by improving the load time.

Bonus Read:  Many of us aren’t currently using cloudflare ‘cos they will require you to change your DNS to theirs before it will function for your site, this is something that most of us don’t actually love doing, hence opting out of their service.

You may also wanna disable the cloudflare plugin if you notice frequent irregular display of your site or unusual breakage of your theme’s CSS, this is because most themes and plugin aren’t fully compatible with cloudflare’s own caching system.

Further Reading: Since we are concerned about getting the best speed possible for our blog and websites, we can also consider this tool below  for optimizing our images for a better and faster site’s rendering and response.
Use tinypng for optimizing your images and pingdom for checking your website’s load time and possible files causing high page load.

Pls drop your thought on this …………….