Yesterday I added a plugin to Site Sketch 101 (which is powered by WordPress) that seemed to take this site from being able to load pages fast to being able to enter hyper time. Hyper Time is a term used in a Nickelodeon movie called Clockstoppers which meant that you were going so fast that everything else seemed as if it were standing still.

As soon as I installed it I instant messaged a friend in Kentucky and asked him if he would hit my homepage and let me know the load time. He hit it several times and the worst time he came across was 2 seconds and the average was 1 second. I was very excited.

The plugin is called WP Super Cache. I had a little bit of trouble installing it so I’m going to provide some instructions that should make it crystal clear what it does and very easy to install and get your site super-charged faster than you can say hyper time.

How does WP Super Cache Work?

WordPress is a php based system that generates pages on the fly. In other words, your home page doesn’t actually exist. It is created fresh every time someone tries to load it. WordPress looks at a database full of variables which include the articles, the post titles, the sidebar widgets and everything else and compiles them into a page and then delivers it based on the settings and options that you’ve chosen in the control panel.

WP Super Cache allows that generated page to be stored as a real static page so that the next person to view it doesn’t have to wait for it to be created. All they have to do is download it and display it on their browser. This drastically reduces the time it takes a viewer to see your pages and increases the possibility of keeping more readers.

It saves those pages without recreating them for as long as you specify or until they are changed by being updated in the control panel or by having a comment added. This means that your content will always be fresh and lightning fast.

How do I install WP Super Cache?

1. I install most plugins through the control panel of WordPress by clicking the ‘Add New’ button under the ‘Plugins’ tab in the sidebar. I ran into a little bit of trouble when I did that with this plugin so let’s take a different route. Begin by heading over to the download page and downloading the latest version of WP Super Cache.
2. Once the file finishes downloading extract the zipped file to a folder on your hard drive.
3. Upload the extracted folder to your plugins directory on your remote server.
4. Then open the local copy of the folder and locate a file called advanced-cache.php and open it in notepad or Dreamweaver.
5. Locate WPCACHEHOME and replace it with the plugin directory relative to your site server. It will be something like this /public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-super-cache/
6. Save that file and upload it to a different directory than where we put the rest of the files. This one needs to be directly inside of the /wp-content/ folder. If there is already one there then delete it and replace it with this one.
7. Inside the settings tab of the WordPress control panel find and open WP Super Cache. Select on. Select clear all cache files when a post or page is published. Select Cache Rebuild. Click the Update Status button located just below that section of the options.
8. Enable super cache compression and then click the update compression button.
9. Update the mod rewrite rules by simply pushing the update button in that section.
10. Browse your lightning fast site.

Your site should now be lighting fast. The first time you load the page it will create that page but every time after that it will be lightning fast. I’d love to hear how this worked for you so be sure to leave some feedback in the comments section of this article and let me know!