When it comes to optimizing your website, the role of caching in WordPress can never be underestimated. Quite a lot has been talked about caching on the internet in general. Yet, it still remains a relatively lesser utilized feature among a large section of the WordPress user base.
What exactly is caching all about? We know that it can speed up our websites, but is there more to it? How should we employ caching to boost the performance of our WordPress websites? Are there any specific considerations to bear in mind?
This article will answer all of the above questions related to caching in WordPress:
The importance of caching in WordPress
What is caching?
To begin with, let us take a moment to familiarize ourselves with the process of caching in general.
In simple terms, caching refers to the process of creating static versions of your content, and serving that to visitors. Static pages are generally rendered quickly in browsers. This leads to faster performance of your website.
What Does a Caching Plugin Do?
In short, caching plugins help WordPress work more efficiently. By default, each time a page on your WordPress website is accessed by a visitor, the content is generated dynamically with lots going on in the background, including multiple database queries and code executions.
A caching plugin will create a static version of your content, removing many of the steps that take place when a page is generated dynamically. The result of this is faster loading times and happier visitors.
In WordPress, rendering or fetching a page (or post or custom post type) requires back and forth queries to be sent to and from the database. Now, more often than not, you will create a post or a page and then you won’t be updating it everyday. Caching creates static copies of your post or page, and serves that to visitors. This way, the back and forth queries to and from the database can be avoided, thereby reducing the server load.
Therefore, if you want to improve your site’s SEO, increase its conversion rates, and offer your visitors a more enjoyable user experience, installing a caching plugin is a quick and effective way to do so.
The benefits of caching
There are various benefits of caching in WordPress, such as:
- First up, it enhances the speed and performance of your website. Static cached files load faster than dynamic database queries, and this leads to faster and better performance of your website.
- Caching can also help reduce the load on your hosting server. This can save server memory and I/O operations. As a result, caching is fast becoming a vital feature, especially for folks with limited hosting plans.
- Faster websites do not just load fast, but also get a favorable rank with search engines. This, obviously, depends heavily on other metrics as well, such as the quality of your content and your SEO settings. But all other things being constant, a website that loads faster will get a better page rank than a slower one. Google has confirmed that it takes page speed in consideration.
- Cached websites provide for a better user experience overall. A faster site helps users browse better. Furthermore, cached site means that the user’s bandwidth is also saved (albeit by a nominal margin), since static cached pages are less in terms of file size as compared to dynamic requests. To make this happen, your caching solution must make use of combined and minified JavaScript and CSS, apart from just basic page caching.
Impressed already? But how do you enable caching in WordPress? The easiest way to do so is by means of plugins. There are several free and premium WordPress plugins out there that help you to enable caching on your website. We shall take a look at some of the key ones here:
Popular WordPress caching plugins
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W3 Total Cache
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WP Super Cache
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WP Fastest Cache
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WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache.
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LiteSpeed Cache
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Autoptimize
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SG Optimizer
Having a good cache solution always helps. If your site fails to load fast, you will lose business and visitors. As such, you should consider setting up a cache plugin on your site at the earliest.
Caching in WordPress is very much like every other optimization and performance related tweak. It needs to be done together with other measures to truly work. If you really want to speed up your site, please reach us at +91 – 9585353555 / raja@rsquaretek.com
