Alright! Here we go folks…my first post. Thought its just a start, I’ll be adding more on a regular basis. So, Stay Tuned!

Lets kick off things with WordPress, and the performance of various caching plugins, which should be used to optimize it. My blog is based on WordPress, and so the following Performance comparison between the caching plugins is based on my personal experience, rather than any subtle hard-core performance benchmarks.

For those of you, who don’t know What WordPress Is? WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) which helps in building great websites or blogs, like mine in a very easy and user-friendly manner. The best part is, its Free and Open-Source. It was originally introduced as a Blogging platform, but its popularity, and ease of customizing lead to its expansion to general purpose websites too. When I started freelancing , I was very surprised to see such a huge contrast between the numbers of WordPress projects, and those based on other CMS (such as Joomla, Drupal etc.). I think it can be easily concluded that WordPress is the most popular CMS, and bloggers/developers favorite platform to develop fantastic websites. Trust me folks, there’s a great demand for WordPress based projects in the web-development market, and if you want to be a web-developer, WordPress is where you should kick things off. Its very easy to learn, understand, and highly customizable with a large repository of Plugins available. You can learn more about it from their website, or I can publish a new dedicated article completely stressing on its basics, and its features (based on visitor’s demands).

Every Website owner or developer want their website to load as quickly as possible. Speed is not much of a problem for small websites, but as they grow in size, the speed becomes a huge factor affecting the overall performance of a website. Search Engines crawlers like to finish their work quickly, while crawling over a single website, and so they obviously don’t like to wait for the content to load up for them to consider for search results. Also, visitors never like waiting. With the advancement in technology, and Internet bandwidth, the patience level of a normal human being is certainly decreasing, and they want to do Almost Everything in No Time. I’m no different in that aspect. In easy words, Speeding up heavy website keeps both the visitors and the Search Engine crawlers happy and attracted to the website.

There’s are many factors responsible for the overall speed or load time of a website page such as the size of content and images being loaded, number of such files, number of scripts (Javascripts etc.), number of database requests etc. Many optimization techniques exist out of which the one I’m going to discuss in Caching, or Caching WordPress based websites to be exact. By caching, we mean temporarily storing data so that future requests for that data can be served faster by providing the cached data instead of loading the complete webpage again with all the images, and linked files etc. This certainly reduces page load time, and optimizes it for speed.

There are many different caching plugins available in WordPress such as WP Cache, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache, DB Cache Reloaded etc. For full benchmark results and performance comparison between various WordPress Caching plugins, you may refer to this website (http://www.tutorial9.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/wordpress-caching-whats-the-best-caching-plugin/). Initially, in my WordPress projects, I always used W3 Total Cache because I found it to be the clear winner on comparing with WP Cache, or WP Super Cache both performance-wise, and ease of configuring them. Yes, its kind of a daunting task to configure the WP Cache, WP Super Cache. Then after reading the above article, I came to know about Hyper Cache, and DB Cache Reloaded, and from that article, the benchmark results clearly showed both of them the winner. But, as I just don’t buy everything I read, so I thought about giving both a try, and comparing the results with my personal favorite W3 Total Cache. I used two tools – SEO Browser, and the Pingdom Page Load Speed Test. W3 Total Cache has some features which both the Hyper Cache and DB Cache Reloaded do not have, but I was looking for real-time performance rather than available features. I tried various combinations on a simple page of my website (Low content, No Flash, Few dynamic Javascript objects, 1 embedded YouTube video, and few light-weight images). I also tried another CSS and JS script minification plugin, WP Minify. W3 Total Cache already has all these features – HTML compression, CSS/JS Minification, Database and Object caching etc., so when I tried it with other plugins, I disabled those inbuilt features first before enabling other plugins to work with it.

Before going over to the result, lets first understand what exactly I noted down from the results provided to me by SEO Browser and Pingdom Page Speed. With SEO-Browser, I noted down the time taken to load the HTML content of the page (just Text & Links). With Pingdom tool, I noted the complete time taken by a page to open up (as if it is being loaded in the web browser by a person). Here are the results (all the values are average values):

From the above results, W3 Total Cache was clearly giving the best HTML caching timing (see SEO-Browser results), but lacked in providing good overall timings (see Pingdom Tools results). Though W3 Total Cache, when used alone, provided good results on comparison with Hyper cache, when used alone. But the combination of Hyper Cache, DB Cache Reloaded, and WP Minify proved out to be lethal. Some, of you might be wondering that there’s isn’t much difference in timings between various combinations. That’s true, but two comparatively bad things I found about W3 Total Cache on comparing with Hyper Cache are

1. Hyper Cache is much easier to configure on comparing with W3 Total Cache. Hence, good choice for the beginners.
2. On using W3 Total Cache, whenever the page is first opened on the browser, it takes normal load time to open it up as if the client’s web-browser is doing the real caching, instead of the plugin. But, when the same page is opened the second time, the results are given above as you can see. In case of Hyper Cache, as soon as it builds up the cache, it shows up cache pages every time it is opened up, in any web-browser. This is one of the best things I liked about Hyper Cache. A small delay compromise in HTML cache timings overcame the overall results.

One more thing I observed is that the DB Cache Reloaded made a big difference in the results, and is also much better in functionality on comparing with the default Database Caching provided by Hyper Cache.

Hence, if you’re going to use Caching plugins for your website, I’d recommend Hyper Cache, DB Cache Reloaded, and WP Minify combination. Though its totally a personal choice. I was just describing my experience. Let me know your opinion about them, and what combination or single plugin you use on your website (if any).