Build My Site for Free

Hi, everyone.  Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com.  In today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to speed up your blog by using the WordPress Cache plugin, or WP-Cache plugin.

And what’s great about this plugin is that it’s a WordPress page caching system; it makes your site much faster and much more responsive.  So what it’s doing is it’s increasing load time for your website.  And Google ranks pages that load faster higher in their search engines, so if you have a fast website, this will be very good for you.

So the first thing we’re going to do is show you how to install this cache plugin, and what you want to do is scroll down your navigation menu, open up the plugins link, and scroll down to where it says, “Add New.”  This will bring you to the Install Plugins page, and what you want to do is just type in right here what I typed in, WP-Cache.  And then once you’re done, you’ll click “Search Plugins.”

And once you come to the results page, you want to install the very first plugin, the WP-Cache.  So you have the version here, the rating –
and it has a pretty decent rating – and the description.  And there are other, actually, cache plugins here as well, but the one you want to use for this is the WP-Cache.  And I already have mine installed, but what you would do is just click the blue link that would say “Install Now Here,” like you see where my mouse is going right now.

And then once it’s installed, you would just click “Activate,” and there you have it.  You have the WP-Cache plugin activated on your blog.  So what you want to do next – to change some settings for it – is open up your settings link on your navigation menu and scroll down to where it says, “WP-Cache.”  And this will bring you to the WP-Cache Manager page.  And right now, you see that it says that it’s disabled, so what you want to do is go ahead and enable it.  And it will just take a second, but once it does, it will say, “WP-Cache is enabled.”

And then next, you have the expire time.  This is where you choose the expiration time for your static pages. And you would just do that by clicking “Change expiration” after you’ve inserted a time here.

And then underneath this is where you want to insert some rejected URLs. And what this means is that if you want certain URLs not to be cached, then that’s what you’d insert right here. So if your URL includes the year and you don’t want to cache last year’s posts, then what you’ve got to do is specify the year.  And what happens is the WordPress Cache system will search if that’s part of the URL, and it won’t cache that page.

And this is where you would insert it right here.  And then, of course, you want to save the strings. The next section is all the file names that can be cached, and a lot of these are here by default, but you can add into this text box as well.

Then the next two spots is where you can just…actually, where it will show pages that are cached or expired and you can delete them.  And the very, very last setting is if your configuration is messed up, you can actually restore the default configuration right here clicking this button.

And this is pretty much all there is to it.  And once you have installed this plugin and used it, you will notice that your load time for your blog is a lot quicker, and this is great for you and for everybody else.

Thank you for watching this video.