Getting Started with Solid Performance
Solid Performance is a must-have caching and performance plugin for WordPress. This guide will walk you through how to get started with Solid Performance, and point you to additional docs on learning more about how it works.
Install and Activate Solid Performance
Solid Performance can be installed directly from the Plugins > Add New interface of your WordPress site’s dashboard. Search for “Solid Performance” and select the correct plugin to install:
Once it’s installed, select to activate it.
That’s It.
At the risk of an overly-short “getting started” guide… that’s all there is to Solid Performance. You could, if you wanted, not configure anything else on the site, and Solid Performance would already be saving server resources and speeding up your site for visitors. The remainder of this guide will explain a few things about how Solid Performance works, and give you a handful of pro tips for maximizing its use.
Confirm Cached Functionality
When installing or using caching functionality on your website, it’s critical to confirm two things:
- It’s working
- You understand how it works, generally.
There’s no need to fully understand the intricacies of caching, but a surface understanding of the concepts will save you precious minutes of frustration when you inevitably run into the telltale signs of caching interrupting your workflow.
How to confirm it’s working
Once installed and activated, how do you know it’s doing anything? Here’s a quick video showing how you can tell. In short: once you have installed and activated Solid Performance, visit (in a logged-out browser!) the front page of the site, or any other page you’ve not added to the exclusions list. You should see a new directory in the /wp-content/cache/ directory for each cached page you visit!
Fixing Display Issues Caused by Compression Conflicts
If your website displays corrupted text or strange characters after enabling Solid Performance, your server may already be applying compression. This often happens when both the web server and PHP attempt to compress content simultaneously, leading to conflicts.
For Apache servers, you may need to disable mod_deflate, while in PHP, zlib compression might be enabled. If zlib compression is causing issues, you can disable it using one of the following methods:
1. Request that your hosting provider Edit your php.ini file
Contact your hosting provider (or if you have root access to your server), to locate your php.ini file and ensure the zlib.output_compression is set to off, like so:
zlib.output_compression = Off
2. Disable via .htaccess
If you don�t have direct access to php.ini, you can try disabling zlib compression by adding this line to your .htaccess file:
php_flag zlib.output_compression Off3. Modify wp-config.php
If the above methods don�t work, you can force zlib compression off by adding this line to your wp-config.php file:
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 0);
After making these changes, clear your cache and refresh your website to see if the issue is resolved.
How to work with caching enabled
A common problem website managers, developers, and other power users run into once they’ve enabled caching on their site is that it can make the experience vary across machines and cause confusion.
When the web designer hops into the home page and adds a new block or modifies some display items, until the cache is cleared (also called purging the cache or flushing the cache) there will be a different user experience for logged-in users vs logged-out users, and for browsers where a page has been cached more recently.
Also, any page that needs to load dynamic content (like a customer receipt) must be excluded from the cache.
Keep in mind, as you use Solid Performance, that a page caching plugin adds an additional step between “content is saved in the database” and “content is displayed in the browser,” which can help with troubleshooting any strangeness.