Accelerating WordPress with WP Super Cache, Opcache and Autoptimize

WordPress can be very fast after some effort on performance optimization with the help from its plenty of plugins. Possible ways include using cache to cut down the number of database queries, improves HTML/JavaScript/CSS code, and optimizing PHP’s performance with opcode cache. In this post, we introduce how to speed up WordPress with OPcache, page cache and page optimization tools/plugins.

Accelerating WordPress

Install WP Super Cache

Search WP Super Cache in the WordPress dashboard, install it, activate it and enable the caching in the plugin admin page.

Enable OPcache in PHP

OPcache improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory. The need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request is not needed if the bytecode has been cached. OPcache is bundled with PHP 5.5.0 and later.

You can use a small php script to check whether the Opcache is working:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Inside of WordPress, you do not need to do any special configuration to make OPcache run for WordPress.

Optimize HTML pages, scripts and CSS files

Autoptimize is a great plugin that can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page and minifies the HTML code. There are quite a lot options to tune to make it work for your sites.

With all these plugins and tools, WordPress can be much accelerated. Enjoy the boosted performance of WordPress now!

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

5 comments:

    1. After this post was published, it seems the WP Widget Cache has been deprecated and is not available now. You can skip it. WP Widget Cache may not help much if you have enabled WP Super Cache + Object Cache.

  1. This is confusing. Are you to use all these plugins at the same time? because some of them do the same thing

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