Came with great recommendations

GTMetrix measures many things. The total load time is only one small part of what it does, so it is expected that the numbers before and after installing any caching plugin will be similar.

Meaning?

Meaning GTMetrix is mostly uesless for measuring the performance of caching plugins.

Hey Neal,

Let’s keep the secrets to ourselves okay? ?? I edited the message to be specific to the content at hand.

RYAN: Since I have already acknowledged being more or less technically challenged, what is a meaningful way to assess the value of a caching plugin?

JON: Gotcha. (Too bad, though: these threads could use a little playful humor . . .)

A load test is probably the best option.

But you can also just check the page load time (for the page itself, not the page plus all it’s attached stuff like images, CSS and JS). You can test this via the Chrome element inspector from the Networking tab. You should notice a significant drop in load time on installing a static page caching plugin like this. You will likely not see any difference between this one and others though.

RYAN

You’ve lost me, buddy! I had to look up “Chrome element inspector” and “Networking tab.” The former is too much code, while the latter allows me to “set protector networking properties”—which I also had to look up. All gobbledygook to me.

I read Taylor’s “Comparison of Popular WordPress Caching Solutions” and I have tried the complicated W3 Total Cache and the simpler WP Super Cache. I liked his argument for simplicity and here I am using his new plugin!

Is there an objective manner in which to assess caching plugins?

I am not overly concerned with shaving fractions of seconds off my loading time. Reasonable speed with reasonable reliability is fine …

Thanks for your comments,

NEAL

Comparing the performance of two different caching plugins is actually quite complex. I recommended blitz.io in 2012, but I haven’t needed to test anything like this in quite a while … https://geek.hellyer.kiwi/2012/09/01/blitz-lo/

You are probably best off just using this Simple Cache plugin IMO, and not worrying too much about what it’s doing behind the scenes. People seem to try really hard to over complicate this stuff. All it’s doing is reducing the tiem (and load on the server) to generate the HTML on your page.

This plugin does seem to do one extra thing, as it has an option to minify your HTML, and that will reduce the size of the page itself, hence theoretically making it load faster. W3CTC and other large caching plugins also offer that functionality too.

R

Thanks again!

I will take your advice and stick with Taylor’s plugin.

N

PS: Visited your site and, needless to say, couldn’t understand much of it. I do understand that living in Berlin could be rather exciting …