Now we have done lots of thing for your high performance WordPress blog. You must be already experiencing the difference. You have optimized theme, smaller yet well designed images and video and finally highly optimized and compressed JS/CSS files.
Now your page size would be very smaller due to compression, its making lesser HTTP requests to server and consuming lesser bandwidth. This all fuel the rocket to fly faster. Today we are about to take another important step towards high performance WordPress blog. It’s browser caching.
Roadmap
What Is Browser Caching?
When you are loading your blog page, if you take a closer look, you will figure out that most of the content are static. This means they are not changing over time. But when a visitor comes again and again, he will have to load them every time.
If browser cache is enabled in the initial visit, browser will save static content in visitor’s computer. If he comes back to the website, the static content will be loaded from cache, not from server. Obviously it will be many times faster.
Most of the modern browsers are automatically doing it. What you can do is instruct browser to do it properly in an optimum way. There are several ways to get it done. However, none of below will work if visitor has disabled browser caching in his browser.
How to Enable Browser Caching?
In order to get this done we have to use .htaccess again. Go to Dreamweaver, access the remote site you have configure through FTP and open .htaccess file. Then put the below code there.
# BEGIN Cache Control ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault A31556926 ExpiresByType text/html A3600 # END Cache Control
Now your server is instructing all visiting browsers to cache entire static content for one year. (31556926 is one year in seconds). However I’m caching HTML content only for one hour since it’s subject to frequent changes.
Now you are almost there to have a high performance WordPress blog. Generally you are now in a good shape. But if you like to go the extra mile, there are few things to do. Optimizing the database is coming up next.
Contact me @MalindaOnline to claim your Free Website Performance Review. I’m giving you a detailed report with identified performance bottlenecks and optimum cost effective solution.
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Tags: #Blog #Performance #SEO