I just installed WP Super Cache and I have to say I wish I had done this earlier!

Before I installed this I noticed that sometimes my blog would timeout and send back only a white page. I thought it was likely because I am on shared hosting and sometimes the PHP or MySQL just wasn’t ready to kick in fast enough (because it never it happens with HTML pages and it seemed like once I hit the first page everything would be “warmed up” and this blog would run normally).

I also been meaning to figure out how to get gzip content encoding on my pages, although I never really tried.

Anyway I installed WP Super Cache and it’s just great. If a post isn’t updated, or doesn’t receive any new comments, then WP Super Cache sends out a cached version and to my understanding should be saving my account a lot of processor cycles and db requests. I don’t post a lot, and I don’t get many comments on my posts so I see absolutely no reason not to have this on. Also, now the cached versions of my pages are gzipped.

Here’s a screenshot of my Firebug console the first time I hit my post “Flash/Actionscript: Innaccurate Math Results” just after installing WP Super Cache:

and here’s a screenshot after… now it’s gzipped, so it weighs in at a lot less and takes less server-side thought so it comes up nice and quick:

Geez… I cut it off in the screen shot, but the page (minus images/css) went from about 25kb to 6kb.

I know this is nothing new to most people and that there are plenty of better articles on this subject. I just get excited when things work nicely.