SpeedyCache – Cache, Optimization, Performance vs WP Super Cache

SpeedyCache is a WordPress cache plugin that helps you improve performance of your WordPress site by caching, minifying, and compressing your website. You can find our official documentation at https://speedycache.com/docs. We are also active in our community support forums on wordpress.org if you are one of our free users. Our Premium Support Ticket System is at https://softaculous.deskuss.com Home Page | Support | Documents Other than caching SpeedyCache can also do the following:- 1. It can minify and combine CSS/JS giving even better optimization as it reduces the file sizes and reduces the HTTP requests to the server. 2. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript resources helping your website to load faster. 3. Lazy load images so that the images can be requested only if they come into the viewport. 4. GZIP files to reduce the size of the file sent from the server. Free Features Caching: Storing copies of the web pages of the desktop version. Caching happens when a user visits a webpage on your website Preload: Preload makes sure the user always sees the cached version of your website as it periodically creates cache. Combine CSS: Combines CSS files present in the header of the page reducing HTTP requests. Minify CSS: Reduces the size of the CSS files. Automatic Cache: Creates cache of post when it gets deleted if preload is enabled. Combine JS: Combines JS files present in the header of the page reducing HTTP requests. GZIP: It applies GZIP compression on the files hence reducing the file size sent from the server. Browser Caching: Caches the website on the browser of the client for repeating visitors. DNS-Prefetch: DNS prefetch is a technique that improves website performance by resolving domain names in advance, before they are needed. Disable Emojis: You can remove the emoji inline CSS and wp-emoji-release.min.js. Exclude: You can exclude certain Pages, User-Agent, Cookies, CSS, or JS from being cached. CDN: CDN helps improve website speed by placing the static files of your cached on their network of servers hence helping deliver content faster at any point in the world. Display Swap: Adds display swap to Google font URL, so when Google font loads the font will stay visible this is enabled by default. Purge Varnish: If enabled it will purge Varnish cache, whenever cache from SpeedyCache is purged. Gravatar Cache: Host Gravatars on your server. *Improve Font Rendering:** Adding CSS property of text-rendering to prioritize speed of render of Fonts. GET SUPPORT AND PRO FEATURES Get professional support and more features to make your website load faster with SpeedyCache Pro Features:- Image Optimization: Image optimization is a way to convert an image to next-gen image formats like webp which load images faster on the web. Instant Page: It loads the page just before user clicks the link, reducing the page load time. Google Fonts: Google fonts are also seen as render-blocking so this feature helps load Google fonts asynchronously. Local Google Fonts: Cache the Google fonts to be compliant with the GDPR rules. Lazy Load: Loading all assets at once can make the page load slower hence lazy load helps by only loading certain resources when they come into the viewport. Minify HTML: It removes empty lines, line breaks, minifies inline Js And Css, removes comments and space in Tags Minify JS: Reduces JS file size. Delay JS: Delays the JS to load on user interaction to reduce or remove the issue of Unused JS. Advanced Combine JS: Combines JS files placed in the footer section helping reduce HTTP calls. Render blocking JS: Before rendering a page the browser parses the HTML to create a DOM tree and if an external script comes it has to stop and wait for the script to execute hence the rendering of the page ends up taking time, hence Render blocking JS feature helps in deferring the load of JS after the render has happened hence the first load get faster. Delete Cache Stats: Provides statistics about the cached files of Desktop or Mobile version and combined/ minified version of CSS and JS. Mobile Cache: Caches the mobile version of your website and shows that version on mobile devices. Database Cleanup: Database cleanup helps you free up your database storage from temporary data, trashed contents, and post revisions which may take a lot of your database storage. PreConnect: Preconnect improves website loading times by establishing early connections to third-party domains. Preload: Preload improves website performance by downloading resources in advance, before they are needed. Critical CSS: Extracts the CSS used by the page in the visible viewport at the time of load. Unused CSS: Removes the unused CSS, keeping the CSS that is being used by the paged, which reduces the size of CSS used on the page. Object Cache: It makes the object to persist by using Redis, to improve availability of the cache. Bloat Remover: Options to remove unnecessary features of WordPress or WooCommerce. Image Dimension: Adds dimensions to the image tag which does not have width or height, to reduce (CLS)Cumulative Layout Shift. Lazy Render HTML: User can lazy render HTML elements which are not in view-port. Preload Critical Images: Preload above-the-fold images to improve LCP(Largest Contentful paint). Caching SpeedyCache caches the website by creating static files on the server and delivers those static files to most of the users who visit the website, The static files eliminate the heavy load of Querying the database for data hence the load of your website is faster. You can preload as many pages as you want, and preloading caches the website in regular intervals of time to reduce the load on the server. Deleting Cache on New/updating Post. You can decide to delete the cache on the creation or updating of a post so that the cache can always stay updated. Minifying/Combining CSS and JS SpeedyCache helps minify the JS and CSS hence it reduces the file sizes. Combining JS combines the CSS and JS fines reducing the file count and making the server handle lesser requests. Cache Lifespan Cache Lifespan is a way to schedule the deletion of cache. Exclude Exclude is a way to prevent SpeedyCache from caching certain files/ user-agents/ cookies. CDN (Content Delivery Network) CDN helps you host your static content on a distributed network optimized to deliver internet content faster it’s not a replacement to a web host. It caches your files on the network edge and delivers the content to the user through the closest and fastest server. SpeedyCache helps you integrate a CDN by rewriting the URLs of the static files you want to host on the CDN or in the Case of Cloudflare it helps with the purging of the cache on the Cloudflare servers. [Pro] Image Optimization Image optimization is a way to convert your images from old formats like JPG and PNG to the new next-gen formats like webp which is designed with the web as the target platform to load images faster. webp images result in smaller and richer images that make the web faster. We provide 3 ways to convert your images to webp. GD(a PHP extension), Imagick(a PHP extension), and cwebp(a webp conversion utility from Google). [Pro] Bloat Remover SpeedyCache has 12 bloat removal options which are listed below. 1. Disable Dashicons 2. Update Heartbeat 3. Limit Post Revisions 4. Disable XML-RPC 5. Disable Google Fonts 6. Disable jQuery Migrate 7. Disable RSS feeds 8. Disable Gutenberg 9. Disable OEmbeds 10. Disable Block Editor CSS 11. Disable Cart Fragments 12. Disable WooCommerce Assets [Pro] Database Cleanup Data cleanup cleans the database by removing the following data:- 1. Post Revisions 2. Trashed Content 3. Trashed and Spam comments 4. Trackbacks and pingbacks 5. All Transient options 6. Expired Transient Options

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users: Users who are not logged in. Users who have not left a comment on your blog. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post. 99% of your visitors will be served static html files. One cached file can be served thousands of times. Other visitors will be served custom cached files tailored to their visit. If they are logged in, or have left comments those details will be displayed and cached for them. The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways (ranked by speed): Expert. The fastest method is by using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve “supercached” static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are “lighter”. This does require the Apache mod_rewrite module (which is probably installed if you have custom permalinks) and a modification of your .htaccess file which is risky and may take down your site if modified incorrectly. Simple. Supercached static files can be served by PHP and this is the recommended way of using the plugin. The plugin will serve a “supercached” file if it exists and it’s almost as fast as the mod_rewrite method. It’s easier to configure as the .htaccess file doesn’t need to be changed. You still need a custom permalink. You can keep portions of your page dynamic in this caching mode. WP-Cache caching. This is mainly used to cache pages for known users, URLs with parameters and feeds. Known users are logged in users, visitors who leave comments or those who should be shown custom per-user data. It’s the most flexible caching method and slightly slower. WP-Cache caching will also cache visits by unknown users if supercaching is disabled. You can have dynamic parts to your page in this mode too. This mode is always enabled but you can disable caching for known users, URLs with parameters, or feeds separately. Set the constant “DISABLE_SUPERCACHE” to 1 in your wp-config.php if you want to only use WP-Cache caching. If you’re not comfortable with editing PHP files then use simple mode. It’s easy to set up and very fast. Recommended Settings Simple caching. Compress pages. Don’t cache pages for known users. Cache rebuild. CDN support. Extra homepage checks. Garbage collection is the act of cleaning up cache files that are out of date and stale. There’s no correct value for the expiry time but a good starting point is 1800 seconds. Consider deleting the contents of the “Rejected User Agents” text box and allow search engines to cache files for you. Preload as many posts as you can and enable “Preload Mode”. Garbage collection of old cached files will be disabled. If you don’t care about sidebar widgets updating often set the preload interval to 2880 minutes (2 days) so all your posts aren’t recached very often. When the preload occurs the cache files for the post being refreshed is deleted and then regenerated. Afterwards a garbage collection of all old files is performed to clean out stale cache files. Even with preload mode enabled cached files will still be deleted when posts are modified or comments made. Development Active development of this plugin is handled on GitHub. Translation of the plugin into different languages is on the translation page. Documentation If you need more information than the following, you can have a look at the wiki or the Developer documentation. Preloading You can generate cached files for the posts, categories and tags of your site by preloading. Preloading will visit each page of your site generating a cached page as it goes along, just like any other visitor to the site. Due to the sequential nature of this function, it can take some time to preload a complete site if there are many posts. To make preloading more effective it can be useful to disable garbage collection so that older cache files are not deleted. This is done by enabling “Preload Mode” in the settings. Be aware however, that pages will go out of date eventually but that updates by submitting comments or editing posts will clear portions of the cache. Garbage Collection Your cache directory fills up over time, which takes up space on your server. If space is limited or billed by capacity, or if you worry that the cached pages of your site will go stale then garbage collection has to be done. Garbage collection happens on a regular basis and deletes old files in the cache directory. On the advanced settings page you can specify: 1. Cache timeout. How long cache files are considered fresh for. After this time they are stale and can be deleted. 2. Scheduler. Setup how often garbage collection should be done. 3. Notification emails. You can be informed on garbage collection job progress. There’s no right or wrong settings for garbage collection. It depends on your own site. If your site gets regular updates, or comments then set the timeout to 1800 seconds, and set the timer to 600 seconds. If your site is mostly static you can disable garbage collection by entering 0 as the timeout, or use a really large timeout value. The cache directory, usually wp-content/cache/ is only for temporary files. Do not ever put important files or symlinks to important files or directories in that directory. They will be deleted if the plugin has write access to them. CDN A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is usually a network of computers situated around the world that will serve the content of your website faster by using servers close to you. Static files like images, Javascript and CSS files can be served through these networks to speed up how fast your site loads. You can also create a “poor man’s CDN” by using a sub domain of your domain to serve static files too. OSSDL CDN off-linker has been integrated into WP Super Cache to provide basic CDN support. It works by rewriting the URLs of files (excluding .php files) in wp-content and wp-includes on your server so they point at a different hostname. Many CDNs support origin pull. This means the CDN will download the file automatically from your server when it’s first requested, and will continue to serve it for a configurable length of time before downloading it again from your server. Configure this on the “CDN” tab of the plugin settings page. This is an advanced technique and requires a basic understanding of how your webserver or CDNs work. Please be sure to clear the file cache after you configure the CDN. REST API There are now REST API endpoints for accessing the settings of this plugin. You’ll need to be authenticated as an admin user with permission to view the settings page to use it. This has not been documented yet but you can find all the code that deals with this in the “rest” directory. Custom Caching It is now possible to hook into the caching process using the add_cacheaction() function. Three hooks are available: ‘wp_cache_get_cookies_values’ – modify the key used by WP Cache. ‘add_cacheaction’ – runs in phase2. Allows a plugin to add WordPress hooks. ‘cache_admin_page’ – runs in the admin page. Use it to modify that page, perhaps by adding new configuration options. There is one regular WordPress filter too. Use the “do_createsupercache” filter to customize the checks made before caching. The filter accepts one parameter. The output of WP-Cache’s wp_cache_get_cookies_values() function. WP Super Cache has its own plugin system, loaded before most of WordPress. Add your own plugin either by putting it in the wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache-plugins directory, or by calling wpsc_add_plugin( $name ) with the full path to the plugin. The cookies used to identify “known users” can be modified with wpsc_add_cookie( $name ) and wpsc_delete_cookie( $name ). See plugins/searchengine.php as an example. Troubleshooting If things don’t work when you installed the plugin here are a few things to check: Is wp-content writable by the web server? Is there a wp-content/wp-cache-config.php ? If not, copy the file wp-super-cache/wp-cache-config-sample.php to wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and make sure WPCACHEHOME points at the right place. Is there a wp-content/advanced-cache.php ? If not, then you must copy wp-super-cache/advanced-cache.php into wp-content/. You must edit the file and change the path so it points at the wp-super-cache folder. If pages are not cached at all, remove wp-content/advanced-cache.php and recreate it, following the advice above. Make sure the following line is in wp-config.php and it is ABOVE the “require_once(ABSPATH.’wp-settings.php’);” line: define( 'WP_CACHE', true ); Try the Settings->WP Super Cache page again and enable cache. Look in wp-content/cache/supercache/. Are there directories and files there? Anything in your php error_log? If your browser keeps asking you to save the file after the super cache is installed you must disable Super Cache compression. Go to the Settings->WP Super Cache page and disable it there. File locking errors such as “failed to acquire key 0x152b: Permission denied in…” or “Page not cached by WP Super Cache. Could not get mutex lock.” are a sign that you may have to use file locking. Edit wp-content/wp-cache-config.php and uncomment “$use_flock = true” or set $sem_id to a different value. You can also disable file locking from the Admin screen as a last resort. Make sure cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock is writable by the web server if using coarse file locking. The cache folder cannot be put on an NFS or Samba or NAS share. It has to be on a local disk. File locking and deleting expired files will not work properly unless the cache folder is on the local machine. Garbage collection of old cache files won’t work if WordPress can’t find wp-cron.php. Check your access_logs for wp-cron.php entries and that your hostname resolves to the external IP address other servers on the network/Internet use. If old pages are being served to your visitors via the supercache, you may be missing Apache modules (or their equivalents if you don’t use Apache). 3 modules are required: mod_mime, mod_headers and mod_expires. The last two are especially important for making sure browsers load new versions of existing pages on your site. The error message, “WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The path to wp-cache-phase1.php in wp-content/advanced-cache.php must be fixed!” appears at the end of every page. Open the file wp-content/advanced-cache.php in your favourite editor. Is the path to wp-cache-phase1.php correct? This file will normally be in wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/. If it is not correct the caching engine will not load. Caching doesn’t work. The timestamp on my blog keeps changing when I reload. Check that the path in your .htaccess rules matches where the supercache directory is. You may have to hardcode it. Try disabling supercache mode. If supercache cache files are generated but not served, check the permissions on all your wp-content/cache/supercache folders (and each of wp-content cache and supercache folders) and wp-content/cache/.htaccess. If your PHP runs as a different user to Apache and permissions are strict Apache may not be able to read the PHP generated cache files. To fix you must add the following line to your wp-config.php (Add it above the WP_CACHE define.) Then clear your cache. umask( 0022 ); If you see garbage in your browser after enabling compression in the plugin, compression may already be enabled in your web server. In Apache you must disable mod_deflate, or in PHP zlib compression may be enabled. You can disable that in three ways. If you have root access, edit your php.ini and find the zlib.output_compression setting and make sure it’s “Off” or add this line to your .htaccess: php_flag zlib.output_compression off If that doesn’t work, add this line to your wp-config.php: ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 0); After uninstalling, your permalinks may break if you remove the WordPress mod_rewrite rules too. Regenerate those rules by visiting the Settings->Permalink page and saving that form again. If your blog refuses to load make sure your wp-config.php is correct. Are you missing an opening or closing PHP tag? Your front page is ok but posts and pages give a 404? Go to Settings->permalinks and click “Save” once you’ve selected a custom permalink structure. You may need to manually update your .htaccess file. If certain characters do not appear correctly on your website your server may not be configured correctly. You need to tell visitors what character set is used. Go to Settings->Reading and copy the ‘Encoding for pages and feeds’ value. Edit the .htaccess file with all your Supercache and WordPress rewrite rules and add this at the top, replacing CHARSET with the copied value. (for example, ‘UTF-8’) AddDefaultCharset CHARSET The error message, “WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The constant WPCACHEHOME must be set in the file wp-config.php and point at the WP Super Cache plugin directory.” appears at the end of every page. You can delete wp-content/advanced-cache.php and reload the plugin settings page or edit wp-config.php and look for WPCACHEHOME and make sure it points at the wp-super-cache folder. This will normally be wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/ but you’ll likely need the full path to that file (so it’s easier to let the settings page fix it). If it is not correct the caching engine will not load. If your server is running into trouble because of the number of semaphores used by the plugin it’s because your users are using file locking which is not recommended (but is needed by a small number of users). You can globally disable file locking by defining the constant WPSC_DISABLE_LOCKING, or defining the constant WPSC_REMOVE_SEMAPHORE so that sem_remove() is called after every page is cached but that seems to cause problems for other processes requesting the same semaphore. Best to disable it. Set the variable $htaccess_path in wp-config.php or wp-cache-config.php to the path of your global .htaccess if the plugin is looking for that file in the wrong directory. This might happen if you have WordPress installed in an unusual way.