Guide to Caching in WordPress

The website loading speed has significantly gained prominence with the evolution of the trends in the digital sphere. It is a huge determinant of the user experience that a website will eventually offer to their audience.

Additionally, the page loading time is also becoming a priority due to its considerations around search engine rankings. Your website’s aesthetic design and each of its amazing functionalities will fail to impress the audience if your website fails to load in the right time.

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. As per a report, if your website fails to load within these seconds as and when a request is made, it will face high abandonment rates. With so much at stake, it has become a compulsion for websites to take care of their page loading times.

Talking of the obvious, it is true that your web host service provider plays the most important role when it comes to determining the loading speed of your website. However, there are a few handful factors as well that can positively impact the loading speed of your website.

We are talking about implementing ‘Catching’ and ‘Content Delivery Network’. While implementing a CDN service comes at a more advanced level for brands, Caching can be easily implemented by websites of all levels.

In this blog post, we will help you explore your options for implementing Caching on your website so that you can effectively improve its loading speed.

What is Caching?

When Caching is in place, your website page is served quite quickly when compared to a non-cached installation. Simply explained, when a new visitor arrives on your website, their request for accessing your web page is received and processed on the server. Once processed, the web page is turned into an HTML file and sent to the web browser for display.

This includes all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, latest posts, the header and footer, the sidebar widgets, and everything on the site. However, when they visit your page again, (if Caching is in place) this HTML which has already been stored, is instantly sent to the browser. Hence, the web page loads swiftly.

When you have a website which has caching implemented on it, all this heavy-lifting is duly taken care of. Since the initial time-consuming process is done once, the request is delivered much faster. This, eventually, loads your website in an instant for the browsers of your site visitors, enhancing their user experience.

Caching in WordPress

If you run a WordPress website, Caching can be a very easy pursuit for your website. This means that you are probably better and seamlessly equipped to get started with the implementation of Caching. The main reason why implementing browser caching is important for your websites is because it reduces the load on your web server, which ultimately reduces the load time for your users. With WordPress, you have readily packaged plugins that help you get started with Caching on your WordPress powered site.

Ways to implement Caching on your WordPress site

The higher the page speed, the better your search rankings, and the more organic traffic you can attract. This is why Caching is a great move. Caching in WordPress can be achieved through the alteration of code, by relying on Caching service provided by your web host, or through the use of simple caching plugins.

If you are running a blog or a website on managed WordPress hosting, you can take advantage of the Caching service provided by your Web hosts. They are highly effective and suited to work seamlessly with WordPress installations. So, if this works for you, you can get in touch with your Managed WordPress hosting provider and inquire about the same.

WordPress Caching Plugins

There are several amazing Caching plugins available in the WordPress repository. Here are the top ones:

WP Rocket: This plugin has been touted to be the most powerful caching plugin by WordPress experts. This plugin is quite easy to set up with minimal configuration and launches upon activation. It takes care of your site’s page Caching, Cache pre-loading, and Static files compression.

W3 Total Cache: The W3 Total Cache plugin is quite a popular option from the repository which has been installed by over a million users and more. It works to reduce the load times via features like a content delivery network (CDN) integration and the other best practices. It also features a Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress.

WP Super Cache: Offered by Automattic, this Caching plugin delivers its promises, seamlessly. It has over 2+ million installations and serves cached files in 3 ways. The plugin is easy to set up and very fast.

WP Fastest Cache: With over 900,000+ installations, the WP Fastest Cache plugin is a rising plugin. This plugin creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Setup of this plugin is also easy since you don’t need to modify the .htacces file. The plugin modifies it automatically.

All of these plugins are fairly easy to get started with. You simply need to download them and install them on your WordPress site to get started. Once set up, these plugins serve up the lighter HTML page instead of processing the comparatively heavier WordPress PHP scripts. Hence, your page loading time is highly improved.

Implementing a proper caching on your WordPress site will also help you improve the SEO ranking of your website since Google favors the move. With a proper Caching plugin in place, you will also be able to save some costing off the bandwidth usage charged by your web host. However, if you are already running a managed WordPress hosting, you might not be able to use the WordPress plugins since several hosts do not permit this.

Conclusion:

Speeding up a WordPress site involves many factors, and among them caching is an extremely important factor. It not only contributes to the enhancement of the user experience on your WordPress website, but it also boosts the SEO of your website. With the ease of Caching plugins, the platform of WordPress further makes it easy for us to make our websites speedy and efficient.

If you have any additional tricks regarding caching, please share them with us in the comments below.

Happy Caching!