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.
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.
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 getter a better pagerank than a slower one. Google has confirmed that it takes pagespeed 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 filesize 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. I have tested the following and found that overall the performance of WP Rocket really impressed, it reduced the load time of my test site from 4 Seconds to 0.9 Milliseconds which is a real noticeable different by minifying CSS, JS, Fonts and simply defering JS on page load.
I have provided a breakdown of features in comparison to the competition.
- W3 TotalCache
- WP Supercache
- Hyper Cache
- WP Rocket
