Is Your WordPress Site on Shared Hosting?
If you're running a WordPress site on shared hosting, you likely think I'm going to tell you that it's time to move to Managed Hosting like the kind we offer at Nexcess. But I'm not. I want to talk to you today about a plugin that is, without question, the easiest solution to speed up your site.
That's a big claim, right?
The easiest solution to speed up your WordPress site on shared hosting.
What is Cache?
Caching (and caching plugins) create copies of the most often accessed content and save it for future requests so that a customer doesn't have to wait for the server to go get it from slow resources (like databases).
Every time a new person shows up to your site, and they ask for a page, WordPress normally uses PHP and SQL to process those requests and pull together the content to present to a user.
A cache keeps all that html that was assembled last time, and makes it available to the next request. This makes response times really really fast.
Why Use a Caching Plugin?
Why should you use a caching plugin? It's simple. To speed up your site. Other than compressing your images, caching is one of the fastest ways to impact your site loading speed.
And that means better Google page speed scores. Which will thrill customers and may even help your content appear higher in Google search results.
Most Caching Plugins are Complex
The challenge with shared hosting is that you are often limited in the resources you can use, and some of the caching plugins out there won't work well.
Another challenge with caching plugins is that they often have 5-10 setting pages filled with stuff you have to configure to make caching work.
And the problem with that is that if you're not a cache expert, you may not even know what all the options / settings will do.
Some plugins have been known to make your site slower simply because you configured it incorrectly.
If You're On Shared Hosting, Here's What You Need
There are tons of caching plugins out in the WordPress repository. But remember what I started this post with – a promise of the easiest one to use.
A longtime WordPress developer just released Surge.
- It's free.
- It is fast.
- It works on shared hosting.
But that's not what makes it the easiest solution to speed up your WordPress site on shared hosting.
Here's what does that – there's no settings at all!
I've told you I use Nitro and it's awesome. But it's not free. And it has settings, even if you pick the one setting to do it all for you, you still have a settings page.
Surge is different. Once you install it and activate the plugin, you're done. There's nothing else you need to do to make it work.
That's pretty amazing, right?