A year ago, we had unsuccessfully tested a number of caching plugins on this Azure hosted WordPress blog. Because of ongoing frustrations with slow page loading speed, we tried installing WP Super Cache again – this time to a resounding YES! IT WORKS! While more work is still needed, the page load speed has dropped from 5.8 sec to 3.0 sec with the basic plugin install.
The caching plugin creates cached php files of website pages
WP Super Cache Setup – Quick and Easy!
- Install the plugin > Easy tab > Caching On That’s all that’s needed to get started!
- Check that the plugin is working > Test Cache The green text means go!
- Go to the Advanced tab > Cache Delivery Method > Simple
- Miscellaneous > Note the following options that work best for our site:
- Turn on the ‘Preload‘ feature
- The preloaded cached posts/pages are stored in wwwroot/wp-contents/cache/supercache/<yourwebsitename>
- This is a list of the cached files for this website as seen in the Kudu UI:
- Downloading a cached blog post’s ‘folder’ from Kudu shows that the zipped file contains 2 php files
- The plugin creator explains how this all works here
The next obvious step would be to use the Azure CDN to increase page load speed. We already have all the website’s image and downloadable files stored and served from Azure Blob Storage to reduce image loading and caching times (read about that here).
However, what we’re looking at doing next is finding a plugin to deliver/capture all static html output from the website. (NOTE: The WP2Static plugin successfully works for this step after a few adjustments to the website)
Ideally, where we’re headed is to create a static blog website hosted within an Azure Storage Account that has the static website feature activated – and deliver content via an Azure CDN (read about how that all works here!) When we get there, we’ll be sure to write about the end-to-end process …