Wordpress Caching Plugins - A Love-Hate Relationship

It's been a while since I played with a Wordpress blog and I had the "chance" to rediscover my love-hate relationship with caching plugins.

With my former website, I had the opportunity to test multiple caching plugins, because, let's face it, who doesn't want to improve the speed of his blog?

But my website was highly customized, part blog, part membership site and most pages were dynamically generated. That included blog posts, because I inserted advertisements inside the content of the post, plus recommendations for further reading at the end.

So the caching plugins were mainly useless in my case. But that didn't stop me from trying to squeeze every ounce of speed from the little thing.

The improved speed - that's a good reason for the "love" part of the relationship. But how about the other facet? Why hate?

Well, if you don't know what you're doing, and sometimes even if you do, changing an option on a caching plugin can definitely crash your blog. And that's not something anyone wants.

However, other plugins can have the same effect, and if you know what caused it and you have a backup, you can quickly recover.

The more insidious effect is when everything seems in order, you actually see a visibly improved speed and you are happy. Only to discover at some point something doesn't quite work as it should.

The problem is: what causes it? It's been a while since you tweaked your caching plugin and you even forgot you did. Tracking down such an issue can be a hassle.

I rediscovered it today with a caching plugin installed on a staging blog. And at some point (too late unfortunately), I remembered that when you have issues you can't explain and you have a caching plugin installed, that's the first you should disable to see if they disappear. They did in my case. But not before I wasted enough time chasing my tail.