So I installed the WP Super Cache plugin. Seemed simple enough, I’d been using WP-Cache for a long time and was pretty please with it. WP Super Cache is based on the excellent WP-Cache plugin and therefore brings all the benefits of that plugin to WordPress. On top of that it creates copies of every page that is accessed on a blog in a form that is quickly served by the web server. It’s almost as quick as if the you had saved a page in your browser and uploaded it to replace your homepage.

So that sounds good, except that I followed all the steps, let the plugin to it’s automagic stuff and then I got a 500 error when attempting to hit my site. OUCH! No good.

Turns out the issue was the way my .htaccess file was written (it did this automatically, no clue why it didn’t work out correctly. Anyway, what ended up in my htaccess was:

Options All -Indexes# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

What it SHOULD be is this:

Options All -Indexes
# BEGIN WPSuperCache
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Make that simple update to the first line, ensuring that the #BEGIN WPSuperCache is on it’s own line and everything started working as expected.