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Plugin Description
Most caching plugins focus on techniques appropriate for the desktop era, trying to minimize the server load and thereby increasing performance. But the that era is behind us now, with mobile devices accounting for more than half of the web traffic. While the legacy caching plugins do handle mobile devices as an afterthought, Easy Cache is the only plugin designed specifically for mobile devices. These mobile devices have bandwidth and data cost/usage requirements that can have significant readership impact, especially in emerging markets. Optimizing your server to handle traffic spikes is not the same as serving highly mobile-aware blog pages. Given that mobile browsing is now well past the tipping point of 50%, we can no longer ignore the specific requirements of mobile devices. Easy Cache is an attempt to address this issue.
Easy Cache is designed to be simple. It has a single-page admin screen (even in the Pro version) with a few simple, easy-to-understand options, with sensible default values. The moment you activate the plugin, it starts serving minified static files and compressed images to your mobile readers. The default options are good for a vast majority of blogs out there. If you would like to change an option, hovering over it will give you a comprehensive description of what it does. Designed to run unattended, Easy Cache invalidates the cached entity whenever there is a source change, and warms up slowly without overloading your server as your readers visit various pages. When it cannot detect the type of device, it fails gracefully and serves a dynamic page.
Although originally designed for mobile devices (as Mobile Cache), Easy Cache can now serve minified compressed static resources to desktop browsers as well, from an independent cache location. Easy Cache now is a complete caching solution with impressive performance and remarkably simple configuration.
Features
- Mobile Specificity: Designed for smart phones and tablets, serving from an independent, optimized cache when browsed from a mobile device.
- Desktop Option: If you would like to it to serve to desktop browsers, Easy Cache can do it as well, caching minified compressed static resources to an independent location specifically for desktop clients.
- Simplicity: Just activate the plugin and forget about it. The default settings will work with most WordPress blogs out there, and are hyper-optimized to work with no intervention from you. If you want to change any default, you will find a friendly, single-page admin page with clear, detailed help and background information.
- User Friendliness: No more admin messages about editing your
.htaccess, wp-config.php, setting permissions, executing commands via ftp, update warnings etc. Easy Cache just works, quietly and efficiently without getting in your way.
- Unified Functionality: What this plugin does (image compression, resource minification, static cache) can be accomplished by using a few other plugins in tandem. Easy Cache just brings them in a unified plugin, with the added guarantee that your source files are never modified.
- Source Sanctity: Easy Cache never deletes or overwrites your existing content like your images, JavaScript and style resources. And it doesn’t require you to modify your
.htaccess, wp-config.php or add extra php files in anywhere. All the optimization is done in a separate cache folder outside WordPress workflow so that if you deactivate or temporarily pause the plugin, your source files and blog processing are left in their original, pristine condition.
- Graceful Failures: In the unlikely event that the plugin cannot create cached resources, it fails quickly and gracefully to let WordPress (and other caching plugins) serve your blog pages.
- Intelligent Invalidations: Easy Cache excels in ensuring that your readers get the latest content. It removes the stale content using a variety of intelligent hooks.
Pro Version
In addition to the fully functional Lite version, Easy Cache also has a Pro version, which brings the same wickedly optimized caching techniques to desktop browsers as well. Moreover, you can have two separate caches for phones and tablets (in addition to the desktop cache), customized to their sizes. The Pro version also adds a whole host of other features:
- Independent caching for tablets, smart phones and desktop readers so that the image resizing is optimized to the target browsers.
- Use of RAM (where available) for blazingly fast cache. You just need to specify the RAM disk location, and Easy Cache will take care of the rest with an absolute minimum of fuss.
- In-memory caching option where RAM disk is not available.
- Full support for Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Supports load-balancing over multiple CDN servers.
- Test mode to serve cached versions to the admin user to verify and benchmark caching.
- Ability to specify individual file types to be excluded from caching.
- Optionally cache RSS feeds.
- Ability to delete cached entities per device type (smart phones, tables or desktop browsers) or en masse.
- Ability to pre-populate the cache so that Easy Cache behaves like a warm cache. The pre-cache process happens in the background without affecting your workflow, or overloading your server.
- Comprehensive help to guide you through in migrating from other popular caching plugins, and on apache/nginx or hybrid servers.
- Integrated CDN cache busting options for easily refreshing off-site content.
- Ability to use TinyPNG for compression for state-of-the-art image compression. [Work in progress]
The Pro version purchased now will have free updates until all these features are fully functional.
Screenshots
Easy Cache admin page, showing the simple, single-page, easy-to-understand settings.
Easy Cache Pro features, showing independent caching by target type (smart phones, tablets, desktop browsers) and CDN and RAM disk support.
My blog performance with no caching.
My blog with a fully-configured Easy Cache set up.
