Adding A Cache To WordPress Sites

When maintaining a WordPress website, the speed at which it loads is super important. Not only for the visitor, but also for SEO. Google and other search engines do grade your site on loading speed. One remedy to help the load speed of your WordPress site is to set up a cache.
What a cache will do is keep a static copy of each page on your site making the site load faster. The reason this works is because the server doesn’t need to go to the page, see if anything has changed, then show the visitor the page. If your site gets a lot of traffic, imagine how taxing that is to the server. Here are some options to help you.

1. WP File Cache

Typically when your server is displaying a cache page to a visitor on your site, they see a static version of the page. That’s how the page loads faster. With WP File Cache, all your pages are still dynamic. While it isn’t as fast as some other cache plug-ins, you aren’t sacrificing anything on the page for speed.

2. WP Green Cache

Many hosting companies are starting to power a portion of their servers using green energy. As an additional measure to help the server use less power and therefore reduce the carbon footprint of your site, you can use WP Green Cache Plug-in. They say it will minimize about 95% of the resources used on your server to serve up a cached page versus a live page.

3. Quick Cache ( Speed Without Compromise )

One headache of using a cache on your site is, when you make changes, they aren’t always visible right away because you aren’t seeing the most recent version of the page. By default, Quick Cache does not send you a cached pages if you are logged in as a user. Users who have recently left a comment also see the freshest content.

4. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is probably the most popular WordPress Cache plugin the list. It claims to be the most compatible WordPress cache option. There are a lot of big name sites out there using W3 Total Cache. One of the reasons it is so popular is, W3 caches every aspect of your site. This means your whole site will load faster, not just certain pages. For those using a CDN (content delivery network), you will have no worries about integrating W3.

5. Shopp Cache Helper

Shopp Cache Helper is more of a plug-in to help the Shopp eCommerce plug-in play nice with W3 Total Cache. If you are in need of a cache plugin, this is a must have for an eCommerce site.
There are different needs for these sites versus a blog style site. When you add a cache to your eCommerce site, you will want to consider how the fact that most of the cache plug-ins are cookie based. With a shopping cart, the cookies are a little bit different. Shopp Cache Helper performs a purge of the cookie if the visitor empties their cart. There are also paths not needing a cache. This plug-in will automatically let W3 Total Cache know.

6. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache works a little differently than some of the other cache plugins on the list. There are 3 scenarios where the visitor is served a static page. If they are not logged in, if they haven’t left a comment or if they haven’t been in a password protected post. Once this is determined by the cache plugin, there are 3 different ways they may be served the page. Mod_Rewrite, PHP or Legacy caching. The pages are attempted to be delivered in this order for speed reasons. The Mod_Rewrite will easily handle high traffic sites. If you are getting tons of traffic from StumbleUpon or Pinterest or Digg, you should WP Super Cache.

Conclusion

Speed is the best friend of a web-page. It makes no difference if you have the best content in the world. If the page loads slow, people will not wait around for it to load. If your site does not have a lot of traffic yet, you may not need to have a cache just yet. However if you get a sudden spike in traffic, you will be glad you had help and your server didn’t freak out from all of the traffic.

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How to setup a feedburner to your blog, blogger Wordpress

One of the first things you should do when you start Blogging is set up a Rss feed..All blogs no matter what platform have a default feed, for Blogger the default feed is

www.Yourblog.Blogspot.com/feed/post/default

But the Google Owned Feedburner offers so much more and don't worry it is very easy to set up.

Feedburner offer so many extras and as you build your blog you will notice so many areas that Feedburner can optimize your blog, we will also go into how feed burner give you the option to provide a 'Subscribe by Email' as you see on most blogs and also you can add AdSense units to your feeds.

Lets get your Feedburner Feed

As Feed burner is owned by Google you can log in with your google account details.
(same as for Blogger ,GMail ,You tube etc..).

Step 1. Go to www.Feedburner.com log in or create an account if you don't already have a google account.

Step 2. You will now come to this page:



Now just enter your blog URL in the space provided :

Example :

http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com

If you have a custom domain :

http://www.yourblog.com

Step 3. Your feed will be created and feed burner will take you through a few steps to get you started, don't panic and think you need to set up everything now as you can go back and make changes.

The one thing you need to set up is the address of your feed, this is similar as choosing the address of your blog and it is best to use your blog address or name.

Your feed URL will be :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YouPickThis

Mine is :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techinologycorbee
Once you feed is ready take some time to look through the options in the menu to: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize and Monetize your new Rss feed.

You can now also change your blogger settings to use your new rss feed as default.

In your dashboard click 'Settings'--> 'Site feed' for your blog to find this option.

Email Subscriptions

You can allow visitors to your blog subscribe by Email.To activate this option you need to go to your Feedburner account and on the homepage click on your feed title.




This will bring you to the Manage feed area, in the top menu click 'Publicize"



In the side menu click Email subscriptions.



Here you can activate the Email subscriptions and get the code for a link or form to put on your blog.For more info on this Feedburner Email Settings.

For more info on getting a Feedburner Feed here is a link to 'Google Help' to set up a feed for :

o Blogger
o WordPress
o TypePad
o MySpace
o Podcasting

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How To Add Google Instant Pages To Your WordPress Site

How Do Instant Pages Work?

Instant Pages builds upon the functionality of Google Instant shaving between 2 to 5 seconds off a search query by using an algorithm of about 200 factors combined with the Google search history to determine which link a user is most likely to click on. It begins contacting the server to load that page in the background as soon as the search results appear. Check out this quick video to give you a better idea just how much faster Instant Pages are!
 

Google has made this technology works for developers as well as searchers. By following the Guide To Prerendering In Chrome, publishers are able to choose which pages on their site they want to prerender when users are already on the page. However, it is important that you limit the number of prerendered pages because it could result in increased bandwidth usage, slow loading of other links and stale content.

 Before You Start

Although the process of implementing Instant Pages is easy, it’s VERY important to make sure you know where to properly place the code. Take it from me, if you aren’t familiar with PHP code placement, you may want to read about the most common mistakes beginners make when trying to copy and paste snippets into their site. If you put it in the wrong place, you WILL break your site. Always do a backup of your site before making any changes and if you’ve made modifications to your theme, it’s best to make changes and test using a child theme.

Adding The Code

You will need to add a few lines of code to your theme’s PHP settings. Go to your File Manager and open the header.php file under your theme by clicking the Edit button.

The page of code that is set by default will open displaying the current PHP code settings. Here’s where you’ll add the Instant Pages code to make it compatible with your site and where you need to be most careful! Before the closing </head> tag, include the following code:

<?php if(is_archive()) { ?>
<!-- Instant Pages codes for Google Chrome --> 
<link rel="prerender" href="<?php echo get_next_posts_page_link(); ?>" />
<?php } ?>

It should look like this when placed in the code file:

Save your changes and test them out on your site. Here you can see the Bombax theme will start to suggest article topics as you start entering letters into the search box. This doesn’t just give a suggested article; it’s also queued to open very quickly if selected.

In conclusion, adding Google Instant Pages as a background tool to your site will keep visitors engaged on your site. With suggested articles and fast page loading, your site will become more user friendly and encourage many return visitors, producing a low bounce rate. Test it out and see for yourself if your bounce rate improves and come back to let us know!

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