July 2nd, 2016 Posted in Computer, Web Development

WP Super Cache on Heart Internet

We’ve recently started getting WordPress sites to pass the Google Pagespeed Insights test to help with SEO. As part of this they are looking for the server response time to be as low as possible. One way to get this down is to serve HTML cached versions of the WordPress pages rather than doing a database query every time a page is loaded. WP Super Cache is a quick and easy way of doing this.

However, we hit some snags getting this to work on client sites hosted on Heart Internet servers, even though they recommend it in a blog post on their own blog. Their ‘support’ department were no use, with no fix and some snarky comments implying we didn’t know what we were doing. A fix was found though by reading the WP Super Cache output comments and finding this blog and it only required a setting to be changed in the WP Super Cache settings to turn $use_flock on.

With that done, pages were now cached, the server response time dropped from 1-2 seconds to around 300ms and Google Pagespeed was happy.