Last night I took the time to install the WP-cache plugin. I held off installing this plugin due to knowing nothing about it. I was afraid if I installed it, I might cripple my site, forcing me to ressurect an older backup then reconfigure. After reassuring myself, I stepped through the fear.

I figured WP-cache was a good solution since my site would sometimes hang while loading various ads on the sidebar. I knew a cache would fix those types of problems. So I searched the Blogosphere for information on completing the chore.

I found many sites describing the process. I found most of the trouble was with permissions. Thus another search began for securing Wordpress when using the wp-cache plugin. I found an article detailing how to handle security problems with the wp-cache plugin installation. It helped me straighten out some of the finer points. Once I finished with that, I tweaked an .htaccess file then checked out the wp-cache administration area.

Administering the Cache
You can modify how long a cache page remains on the server. The default of 3,600 seconds (60 minutes) seems like a good amount of time for the traffic I receive. I kept everything the way it was, after toying with all the settings of course. Then I went back to my home page and right clicked to select view source.

My page was loading in half a second! I wanted to see what other sites had in terms of speed. I felt like a grease monkey webmaster daring to look underneath the hoods of others’ sites. I knew Problogger uses the wp-cache plugin. His site would crash often if it wasn’t for the cache. I visited his page and right clicked to view the source. That’s when something interesting happened.

I understand why the Problogger site loads slower than my own. I do. That wasn’t the realization that occurred. What did occur? I discovered a few monitoring services Problogger uses. He very well could have written about all these services too, but I just found two sites in particular I had never heard about. I felt like a sleuth.

ClickTale.com: A site where you can record, watch and understand. The service looks amazing. Basically the hosted software records movements of mouse clicks then allows you to play back your own traffic history. I love the idea of it, but haven’t tried it out for any tests. I do remember Darrin talking about the heat map feature, which is also part of this service.

103Bees.com: This site analyzes search traffic to help you optimize your site. I’ve placed the code on my pages and will be monitoring how well it does. The service seems fairly good at what it does. I’m going to test it out for a few weeks, then write a little bit about the results.

It Pays to Look under the Hood
The exercise started out simple enough. I wanted to find out how my site’s speed measured up to other blogs. I found my site does serve up fairly well and I also found a few new tracking solutions. It’s just what I need — more stats!

Have you noticed an increase in my site’s load time?