Supercacher is one of the USP of Siteground hosting. It offers caching at various level and improves your site performance. This also helps you to lower down number of execution for your site, and this your site abide by CPU process limit of Siteground.
In this guide, I will share how you can enable Supercacher for your Website hosted on Siteground. In this case, I have a WordPress blog which is hosted on Siteground.
Before I will show you the steps to enable Supercacher in Siteground, let’s learn about the Supercacher first.
What is Supercacher & how it helps Website owners?
Supercacher offers four types of caching to Siteground hosting users, which works above Apache. Here are those various caching types that you can enable using Supercacher.
Varnish Static Cache Option:
Static cache creates a copy of your files (Images, JS or any other) into the RAM, and next time when a visitor request those files, they are served directly from the RAM. This cache type is recommended for any website hosted on Siteground hosting.
Varnish Dynamic Cache Option:
This cache type is highly recommended for those who are using WordPress, Joomla Or Magneto. Varnish dynamic cache caches the HTML output created by the PHP code of these applications & serves it directly from the RAM, instead of generating it each time. This saves a lot of execution time and helps you to preserve your server resource. None the less, this improves the load time of your server significantly.
Memcached Option:
Memcache caches the database queries, and helpful for websites that are using the database.
Google PageSpeed cache:
Siteground let you enable mod_pagespeed Apache module by Google with a single click. It optimizes the file size and make your webpage load way faster than before. I have used it in the past, and it improved my site performance by almost 128%.
Note: Currently Google PageSpeed module cannot be used together with the Static and the Dynamic cache options
If you are hosting a WordPress blog on Siteground, I recommend you to enable Varnish Static, Dynamic, and Memcache. This will significantly improve your site performance. If you have installed WordPress on Siteground using Softaculous, chances are Supercacher enabled for your site.
Even if you are not sure, you can read this tutorial to check & enable Supercacher for all your domains hosted on Siteground hosting.
How to check & enabler Supercacher on Siteground hosting:
Login to your Siteground cPanel, and click on Supercacher under Site improvement tools.
Varnish static cache:
By default, all the existing domains (including add-on domains) will have static cache enabled. On this screen, you can turn Static cache on or off for individual domain. You can also click on master flush to flush existing cache of all domain.
Enable Varnish dynamic cache:
If you are using WordPress, Joomla Or Magento, I highly recommend you to enable dynamic cache. This will improve your site performance to the great extent. To use this, you need to install a WordPress plugin that you can download from official WordPress repo here. This plugin is called SG CachePress.
The purpose of this plugin is to purge the Varnish cache when you publish a new post, somebody comment or any other major changes happens on your site. This plugin will let you enable disable the Dynamic cache from your WordPress dashboard. So your first step is to download and Install SG CachePress plugin on your WordPress blog. Now follow the next step:
Unlike static cache, Dynamic cache is not enabled for all the domains. You need to add the domain by clicking on add application under Level 2: Dynamic varnish cache. (This is under Site improvement tools > Supercacher).
Once you have added your site by clicking on Add application, simply toggle the button from Off to on, to enable varnish dynamic cache. Remember, it’s mandatory to have SG cachePress plugin installed and activated on your blog.
Note: Once you toggled the manage application cache button to on from off, you can always switch it off from cPanel or using the plugin settings inside your WordPress dashboard.
Enabling Memcache:
This is the 3rd cache option that you would like to activate for your blog. According to official doc
“The Memcached technology speeds up database calls, API calls, and page rendering by storing data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times a database is queried. SIteGround is the only company that applies the Memcached algorithm in a shared server environment thanks to its unique isolation methodology.”
You need to have SG Optimize plugin installed on your blog to use Memcached. Now Click on Level 3 Memcached and toggle the button to on to enable Memcached on all your sites.
Go to your WordPress dashboard, click on SG Optimize > Supercacher config & at the bottom you will see the option to enable Memcached. Toggle the button, and Memcached will be enabled for your WordPress blog. (See above screenshot)
With this, your site performance have been improved by great extent. Siteground Supercacher technology is something you should definitely enable for your site.
If you have any query related to Supercacher technology on Siteground, feel free to drop a comment. Found this tutorial useful? Share it with others on Facebook & Google plus.
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Hello,
I’d like to know whether activating Google PageSpeed module (and then at the same time deactivating the static/dynamic/mem caches since they can’t be activated simultaneously) will lead to an actual benefit in terms of performance or not…
Thank you
Matteo
Hi,
Thank you for this complete tutorial.
Do you still need W3 Total Cache if all 3 caching levels are activated within SiteGround?
@Yves
You don’t need W3 Total cache or any other cache plugin when Supercacher is enabled. Though I suggest you to enable Cloudflare for your site as it would help a lot.
You need them If you want to minify html ,CSS and js supetcacher doesnt minify or convine CSS files and place them in the footer.
I thought SG blocked W3 Total Cache.
Can you actually use W3 on SG? How do you do that – which options from W3 are you enabling and which improvements have you seen?
i have the BASIC plan on siteground . i can only activate level 1 cache. Is better to use level 1 with pagespeed module on or use w3tc without level1 and pagespeed module off?
What is better in terms of performance, pagespeed or supercacher? Currently I can’t combine them.
Thank you Harsh. I found this post while reading a post about the steps you took to reduce the CPU cycle on your website – Shoutmeloud. I have activated SiteGround SuperCacher. I have a question – do I need to disable my previous cache plugin – W3 total cache?
Yes Sonal. You should disable W3 Total cache. I hope you have already enabled Cloudflare for your domain.
Because I have basic plan right now for my blog, so I don’t have the access to this Super Cacher. Most Probably I will upgrade my account to Grow Big very soon.
Thanks for the knowledge!
Hi Mr. Agrawal,
I just want to clarify is the SuperCacher visible or available only in cpanel if the site is hosted by SiteGround?
Thanks
@Shawn
Yes, it’s enabled for any Siteground web-hosting user who is on Growbig or GoGeek plan. You need to enable the setting from cPanel & also install Supercacher plugin from your WordPress dashboard.
Hi Harsh,
I am planning to set up an ecommerce site with woocommerce. I heard that cloudflare SSL free version poses some problems. Do we need to upgrade cloudflare to paid plan?
Also I read somewhere that if you activate cloudflare inside siteground, it won’t add SSL certificate but creating an account on Cloudflare itself will add SSL. Is this true?
Thanks.
@Stan
For an E-commerce site I would recommend you to use LetsEncrypt which also offers free SSL. Here is a nice guide on different types of SSL certificate which would give you an idea of which one you should pick.
If I would have been at your place, I would have taken advantage of LetsEncrypt SSL offered by SiteGround.
I have SG, and I use CloudFlare too. My domain is pointed to CloudFlare’s name servers. We had to do it that way for some reason, can’t recall why. Anyways.. When setting up caching, do you use any plugins in addition to the SG CachePress, or is that a bad idea? Also, how to best configure CloudFlare and SG CachePress to work well together?