Getting best performance out of vCandy

vCandy is one of the fastest loading WordPress theme and to leverage its real strength you should follow the suggestions given in this post. vCandy rocks! seriously we have compared it with all the top contenders (including Twenty eleven theme ) based on the following popular metrics:

1. Google Page Speed Score
2. Yahoo YSlow Score
3. Total Page Load Time
4. Total Page Size

And we have got better scores in most of the above metrics plus the bonus 100% validation from W3C which even Twenty Eleven fails to get. After you’ve successfully setup vCandy, we recommend using the following plugins in order to enhance your loading speed:

1. W3Total Cache Plugin
2. WP HT Access editor

W3Total Cache Plugin is the ultimate caching plugin on WordPress.org which would help you to leverage the real power of vCandy. We suggest you to enable the following features in the W3T plugin:

1. Enable Page Cache, Database Cache, Browser Cache and Object Cache.
2. Enable HTML, JS and CSS minification .
3. Apart from this if you are using a CDN then you must enter the details of the CDN in the Plugin.

The other Recommended plugin comes with a caution, the plugin plays with htaccess any error in it can lead to site malfunction. Therefore we recommend that only advanced users should use it. This plugin however utilizes the browser cache by adding an expires header to the files. You can verify its importance this is form the Yslow scores you would get by enabling this feature.

We suggest you to use the WP HTaccess editor plugin and add the following code on the top of your HT Access file (after backing ti up):

###################################
#   HTTP Header Caching Setting   #
###################################
# Set far-future expiry for images, css, and js
# Remember that you MUST change the filename whenever you update these items!
# Enablel this in your httpd.conf :
# LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<Filesmatch “\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf|ico)$”>
    ExpiresActive on
    ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 years”
</Filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

This would greatly enhance your page load time and Page speed and Yslow scores.

Apart from this we will help you out with the customization and improving your page load scores. Contact us via the forum thread : vCandy forums
Improving Page load times