How to speed up your OpenCart store with QCache.

Don't be fooled by the much more expensive extensions

How it works
Simply defined the word 'cache' means to store or hide or store something for future use. The full page cache stores the web page data generated by OpenCart and saves it to disk to minimize the amount of content that it needs to produce which is a time consuming process. Instead of dynamically creating the same content every time a page is requested the cache simply retrieves a saved version.


How it affects your SEO ranking
Google and other search engines now incorporate page-load speed into their ranking algorithm. Be sure your store loads fast enough to impress the search engines. QCache significantly improves the 'time to first byte' (TTFB). This is the length of time it takes for the server to respond with the first byte of a page. By speeding up a slow store you can expect increased traffic and a higher conversion rate.


Features
- TTFB can be reduced to less than 0.03 Seconds (30ms)
- Caches your homepage, category pages, product pages, information pages and manufacturer pages inside OpenCart
- Ability to exclude specific routes from being cached
- Supports multi-currency, multi-language and multi-store
- Reduces server load. You can potentially save on expensive hosting by simply using this extension to reduce server load and speed up your store
- Auto cache clearing when categories, products and information pages are updated
- Panel on front-end pages to show status of the cache and a button to clear the cache for that page manually. This only shows while an an admin user is logged in and can be enabled/disabled in the module configuration page.


Custom Options
- Set expiration time. If necessary you can specify a default expiration time for all cached pages
- Set specific routes to ignore. This is useful for your custom routes or modules that you do not want to be cached
- Show/hide front-end cache panel
- Enable/disable Gzip compression (please check with you host that this is included with your hosting account before enabling)


What is automatically ignored by the cache
- Pages that the user visits after they have logged in or added items to their cart. This is to prevent tainting of the user-specific and cart-specific information on the pages that are requested.
- Any POST requests such as a contact form request as the output usually depends on user input

Updates
2nd April 2015 - v1.3 released.
- Improved route ignoring system
- Added 'product/compare' to the list of default ignore routes