Today we're going to compare the performance of a WordPress site before and after we install and optimize the WP Super Cache plugin.

We're running Ubuntu 16.04 Server, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 with the Zend OPcache, MariaDB, and WordPress 4.6 with a few other plugins (Akismet, Jetpack, Yoast SEO, and Google Analytics). The system itself is a humble virtual server with 1 "core", 2 GB RAM, and SSD storage, costing $10/month.

For the past few years I've been offering affordable, fully-managed web hosting services at GeoffStratton.com. If you're looking to run a web site where you can focus on content and not the technical details, I can help.

Please note: I'm generally not accepting new hostees these days unless I have a reasonably good idea of who you are. If you have no online presence, or you're just getting started, I'd suggest making use of one of the many free hosting services to build up your audience.

This article is intended to serve as a simple WordPress plugin development tutorial. For the purpose of demonstration we'll create a plugin that removes comment spam.

For this to work, you have to be running some sort of anti-spam system like Akismet that marks spam comments as such when they're submitted. Comments are written into a table called wp_comments in the database of your web site, and if they've been identified as spam, the word "spam" is written into their comment_approved field. Here's a look at the wp_comments table in phpMyAdmin: