Did you know the most popular social platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn use caching?
Caching is a mind-boggling innovation that completes one straightforward thing truly well: it makes your site truly quick. Website speed is the first thing your visitors notice which is pretty important, as individuals don’t usually like to wait too much.
In fact, this study by CDN service Akamai found that 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
What is Caching?
Caching is the process of temporarily storing frequently requested information into a temporary storage. This allows computers to access that file information faster.
When somebody visits a page on your website, they have to demand data from your web host. These solicitations incorporate files such HTML and PHP documents, and other content such as pictures, videos and fonts. What’s more, the client likewise needs to recover content that is stored in your WordPress database. For example, posts and pages.
Since WordPress produces content dynamically, this implies it demands fresh information about a web page at each page visit.
How caching plugins work?
As speed is a crucial factor for any website, WordPress developers found a way to create caching plugins that would improve performance on any WordPress website.
Generally speaking, the pages and posts on your site won’t change much once you publish them. Except if you redesign your website or update content.
So what a caching plugin does is creating a copy of the page after the first load, and then displays that cached version to future visitors that arrive on that website. Here’s another good illustration of how it works.
What’s great at WordPress caching is that it happens without the guest knowing about it. It minimizes the measure of information that is transmitted between the guest’s browser, the WordPress database and the web server. The result is faster loading times.
What plugins we do recommend?
There are many caching plugins built for WordPress. Two of the most installed ones are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
At CodingHeads we believe W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress caching plugin for performance optimization. For example WP Super Cache does not do a great job optimizing JS and CSS code. To make it work properly you will need to have another plugin installed (Autoptimize).
There is also LiteSpeed Cache plugin (800k+ installations) which, some people argue, might be even better that W3TC. However this works best on websites hosted on LiteSpeed servers (which are rare and expensive)
- W3 Total Cache (1+ million active installations)
- WP Super Cache (2+ million active installations)
- LiteSpeed Cache (800k+ active installations)
Here at CodingHeads we are interested in making websites load fast. Using a caching plugin will help your users have a better experience.
In case you’re not currently using a caching plugin on your WordPress website, this could be a good start.