What is WordPress caching and its Importance?

Caching refers to the process of creating static versions of your content and serving that to the visitors. Static pages are generally rendered quickly in the browser. WordPress caching improves the performance of your website. In this article, we will have a look at what WordPress caching and its importance.

In WordPress, rendering or fetching a page requires back and forth queries to be sent to and from the database.  Caching create a static copy of your post or page and serves that to visitors. This way back and forth queries to and from the database can be avoided, thereby reducing the server load.

It is a very powerful tool to make your WordPress site load faster and handle lots of traffic. The object of caching is to store dynamically generated data in a static format so you can retrieve that data again without further processing.

WordPress is an application that calls a database to retrieve for your users, caching your content is a helpful way to speed up the performance of your server. Most WordPress cache plugins come with tons of features that are easy to confuse a user who is not actually a developer.

It is a fundamental factor in determining a site’s overall performance. Especially in WordPress, it generates HTML pages dynamically. By employing PHP code coupled with MySQL database queries.

With properly configured caching protocols your WordPress site can be orders of magnitude faster. It helps in preventing redundancy and speeds up load times of your site for free. Speeding up your WordPress site can be employed in 3 primary ways:

1. Use high end, insanely powerful, clustered servers
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
3. Configure WordPress Caching

Website speed is essential to a great web experience. WordPress.com employs multiple levels of caching automatically.

Benefits of caching:

There are various benefits of caching in WordPress, such as:

• It enhances the speed and performance of your website. Static cached files will load faster than dynamic database queries, and this leads to faster and better performance of your website.
• It helps to reduce the load on your hosting server. This saves server memory and I/O operations. As a result, it is fast becoming a vital feature, especially for users with limited hosting plans.
• Faster websites do not just load fast, but also get a good ranking with search engines.
• Cached websites provide a better user experience overall. A faster site helps users browse better. Furthermore, cached site means that the user’s bandwidth is also saved. Static cached pages are less in terms of file size as compared to dynamic requests. To make this happen, caching solution must make use of combined and minified JavaScript and CSS, apart from the basic page caching.

The easiest way to enable this for WordPress website is by using plugins. There are several free and premium WordPress cache plugins out there that help you to enable caching on your website. They are:

• WP Super Cache
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• Cache Enabler
• Comet Cache
• WP Rocket

It is very much like every other optimization and performance. It needs to be done together with other measures to truly work. If you really want to speed up your site, you should deal with any of these plugins.Having a good cache solution always helps. If your site fails to load fast, you will lose business and visitors. As such, consider setting up a cache plugin on your site at the earliest.

Why caching is important?

Most people don’t think about what happens behind the scenes every time someone visits a page, but the server does. If you use WordPress, or any other similar content management system that doesn’t have to cache, there are a series of steps that server has to complete to go from page requested to page delivered.

Basically, without caching, when a visitor tried to load a page, the page itself doesn’t exist. Instead, the server receives the request, WordPress queries the database for the content that’s supposed to be in the page and builds the page on the fly before delivery. Once that visitor is gone or goes to another page, the page disappears and the process starts over again.

While this is an oversimplification, the main issue is that the server has to create the page every time someone looks at it. While this is great in that rapidly changing pages are updated for each visitor, it’s a lot of work for a server and even a decent VPS, such as my own, can struggle under that if there are a lot of visitors coming at once.

A cache plugin, on the other hand, keeps WordPress from having to create a new page every time. The page is created once and held onto for a period of time, usually a few hours. Subsequent visitors to that page get the cached version, which prevents the server from having to check the database and assemble the page from scratch. To the visitor, this is much faster and to the server, this is much easier.

Why caching is easy to forget?

A lot of bloggers don’t see the need or importance of caching. It is most useful when a lot of people are trying to load the same content. Most blogs don’t see the kind of traffic level where caching has a major impact one way or another. For example, the website only gets a visitor once or twice a day, then it is probably being loaded dynamically every visit, caching or no.

The reason is that the cache, most likely, expires between visitors, forcing the creation of a new page. On low-to-medium traffic websites, there are probably only a few pages that get enough traffic to regularly deliver cached content and even then, it doesn’t impact the server. A well-optimized server can serve a decent number of dynamic pages without a problem. So while it has at least some speed benefit, it is usually one that is difficult to notice, especially to the naked eye.

When caching matters?

One of the strange things about the internet is that it has a way of quickly giving a lot of attention to something. Between social media such as Facebook and Twitter as well as social news sites like Reddit, a tidal wave of traffic can hit any site at any time.

These types of moments are what bloggers work for an opportunity to reach a large audience and a chance to capitalize and reach long term. However, you cannot do that if the website is down. But it doesn’t make sense to buy and pay for hosting strong enough to survive those waves when 99% of the time you only need a fraction of it. For example, it is like buying a syntax, to have a glass of water, expensive and waste.

Instead, the best thing is that make sure the website is as efficient as possible so it can survive waves of traffic visiting the same page without trouble. Caching is the best way to do that. So. If you don’t cache then you are limiting the number of visitors to your website.

Final Thought

Caching is a technology that increases the speed of your website without sacrificing anything in the process. When used correctly, it’ll not only result in significantly faster load times but also decrease the load on your server. Hope you liked this article about WordPress caching and its importance.

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