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Simple:Press Pre-Sales Questions (mostly about CDN)

UN
Unknown
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Sep 17, 2015 · 11:02 am · Edited

 Hello all! I am interested in getting your Platnium package for Simple:Press. I had a few questions before I take the plunge though. I have several years experience running a very large vBulletin site in the past, so I am good there. I am just curious about installation given my current WordPress install.

Just as an FYI, I have a WordPress site (obviously) running Woocommerce and W3 Total Cache and use both MaxCDN and CloudFlare as external CDN services.

Obviously, I don’t want to cache the forum itself as a whole since (as far as posts go anyways) it is not static. For the CDN, I should be able to create a page rule to exclude the SP install from the cache. But how about W3 Total Cache (W3TC)? Any comments there? Pitfalls that I should be aware of? Tips and tricks? That sort of thing? I am pretty new to W3TC, but I think I can set up exclusions there as well. But then, speed concerns come to mind. I have a screaming fast site and want to keep it that way. If I have to exclude SP from caching, it is fairly fast on its own? I’d like to keep it on the same domain (if for no other reason that increasing time on the site and decreasing bounce rate), but would it be better just to set it up on its own sub-domain?

Thoughts and experience on this would be greatly appreciated as I make my purchasing decision.

Thanks!

Michael

1 Answer

New Answer
IK Ike
Ike
Member
Member since Mar 2014
2,086 posts
Sep 17, 2015 · 11:42 am

Hey Michael,

You’re correct in saying that you shouldn’t cache the forum page as you say the forum is dynamic on a static page so you’ll get all kinds of problems if it is cached.

I’ve never personally used W3TC, but I know a lot of users here do and do so successfully by excluding the forum page, simple as that really! By the look of it, it’s a pretty straightforward process and to be sure you can always check out the bottom of the source code of your forum page to make sure it’s been excluded properly.

Simple:Press does allow you to enable combined CSS / JS caching, and if you’re using Gravatar’s it’s highly recommended to make use of the Gravatar Cache plugin as this dramatically speeds things up especially on larger forums.

As to overall performance it’s a tough one to call. Many factors are going to play a part such as quality of hosting and size, but our forum here should give you a good idea of how a fairly large forum copes. I’ll leave it for others to comment further on that point.

Hope that helps!