WordPress® All-in-One For Dummies®

Advanced Plugin Configuration

In this section, we explore two plugins that require slightly more advanced configuration: WP Super Cache and WordPress.com Stats. Both of these plugins have advanced configurations — that is, they aren't a “set it and forget it” type of plugin, as users do need to perform additional configuration in order for the plugin to work on their site.

WP Super Cache

We recommend this plugin for every WordPress site because it helps shorten the time it takes for your site visitors to pull up the site in their browsers by serving static HTML files rather than dynamically generating the WordPress pages they see each time.

For the best performance results with this plugin, make sure that PHP Safe mode is disabled on your web server, and that the Apache modules mod_mime and mod_rewrite are installed. If you are unsure whether Safe mode is disabled, or if your server already has these Apache modules, check with your Web hosting provider. Additionally, you can ask your hosting provider to tweak the server configurations for these as well — unless you own the server or have a dedicated server configuration, it's likely that you do not have the necessary system administrator access to the Web server to make these configurations yourself.

After installing and activating WP Super Cache (check Chapter 2 of this minibook for a refresher on installing and activating plugins), ...