WP Super Cache is one of the most popular wordpress website caching plugins. It’s free, and beginner-friendly. There are just a few quick steps to get it up and running on your website.
First though, make sure that you don’t already have a caching plugin running on your website. You will have conflicts if you try to use two at the same time. Also check to see if your hosting provider already automatically does caching for your website by default (eg. websites hosted with Siteground will already have caching enabled).
Install WP Super Cache
On your wordpress dashboard, look along the black column on the left for a section called ‘Plugins’, then use the ‘Add Plugin’ button.
Now type ‘WP Super Cache’ into the search bar.
When you find the plugin, use the ‘Install’ button to download the plugin to your website. Once it has finished installing, the button will change to ‘Activate’. Hit this button to switch the plugin on.
Plugin Activation
After you activate the plugin, you will see a notice that the plugin is currently disabled. Use the blue link to get to the WP Super Cache settings page. Alternatively, you can find it in the Dashboard under Settings -> WP Super Cache.
This takes you to the WP Super Cache plugin settings, and to the ‘Easy’ tab.
Next you will need to select the ‘Caching On’ option and make sure to click the ‘Update Status’ button to apply the change.
Plugin Configuration
Some extra configuration changes that you can make are compression and expiry time. To access these, go to the Advanced Tab in the WP Super Cache settings.
By default, compression is disabled in case there is a conflict with your website hosting. You switch it on here (remember to hit the blue ‘update status’ button to apply the change. If you have any problems, you can switch it off again.
The other thing you might want to change is the expiry time. This is how long a page cache will be kept before it’s considered stale and needs to be refreshed. For a low traffic website where the pages aren’t being updated very frequently, you can increase the expiry time to 3600 seconds (1 hour). Again, remember to hit the blue ‘Change Expiration’ button to apply the change.
One last thing…
Great, you now have caching enabled on your website. One thing that you may need to be able to do is to manually update the cache.
If you make an update to a page and you’re not seeing the change on the live site yet, then this is most likely because of the caching.
Manually updating the cache
You can wait for the cache to update, but you can also manually clear the cache, which will force the creation of a new copy of your updated page to be generated for the cache. You’ll find this in the plugin settings.
Look for the ‘Delete Cached Pages’ section. The ‘Delete Cache’ button will refresh the cache and you will see your updates applied to the live website.
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