Two Quick Wins for This Blog: Caching and Visitor Analytics

Two small optimisations to the blog today: adding a caching plugin to speed up page loads, and wiring up visitor analytics.

Enabling the TpCache plugin

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1. Go to the TpCache GitHub repo.
2. Download the plugin: https://github.com/phpgao/TpCache/archive/master.zip
3. Drop it into the site’s /usr/plugins/ directory.
4. Unzip it and rename the folder to TpCache.
5. In the site admin panel, go to Plugins, find TpCache, and enable it.
   • If Memcache/Redis PHP extensions aren’t installed, it’ll fall back to a MySQL-backed driver.
6. Once it’s configured, force-refresh the homepage to see the effect.

If you don’t want to bother setting up Redis, that’s as far as you need to go.

Adding Google Analytics

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• Open Google Analytics and create a new account in settings.
• Once created, go into the tracking-code configuration and add it manually.
• Copy the tracking snippet, then find the header.php file in the current Typecho theme.
• Paste the snippet in anywhere sensible — you can verify it’s working from the Google Analytics dashboard.