How Does a WordPress Cache Plugin Help?

Speed is CRUCIAL

The key to any successful website is a great user experience. Among factors that can highly annoy or impress a visitor of your WordPress website, speed is a very critical one. Speed holds a lot of importance from the SEO point-of-view too. A user can have a pleasant experience if your site loads really fast and this automatically reflects in your SEO score. You can use practices of caching in your website for speedy retrievals of pages. Web documents like HTML pages and images are stored temporarily using a cache. When a particular page is requested by a user, the server shows a cached copy of the page. It will not re-query  the database for this page. Requests are answered by referring the cache.

Two direct impacts of caching are :

• Page response time is improved
• Server resources are less taxed

Web cache stores copies of documents passing through it; subsequent requests are satisfied from the cache.

Two popular caching systems are:

• Client Side caching
• Server Side caching

Client Side Caching:

Modern websites and browsers support client side caching. Each webpage has static elements like JavaScript, CSS, Images and others. Every time a user presses refresh, these will be loaded from the local cache. This local cache is maintained on the user’s computer itself, on the hard  disk. The same data is never reloaded, it is simply picked from the local cache. The usage of server resources and the response time are optimized by this.

Server Caching:

Server caching is inclusive of a couple of concepts. Lets look at each one of them….

Page Caching

Dynamically created HTML pages are saved on the server’s hard disk. Requests are served from this cache.

Database Caching

The database for your WordPress website changes when you publish a new post. So it makes complete sense to secure and maintain a cache of the database structure locally. This status of this database remains the same unless you add something. Once an addition is made you will be required to clear the cache and recreate it for the new and updated content. Such efforts look completely viable when we understand the amount of resources that a database consumes to serve requests.

 Object Caching

A lot of technical caching is supported by WordPress. This includes Caching API, Transient API and several other factors. WordPress extends support to Cache plugins for managing these.

 Opcode Caching

An executable code is created for every PHP code. The web server is feeded this executable code. Opcode caching refers to the saving of the executable codes generated by the compiler and reiterating them for similar requests.

 Cache Purging

Refers to the concept of re-caching the old caches.

Cache purging occurs whenever a element is added or changes to existing elements are introduced.

WordPress support caching. Using an effective WordPress cache plugin will certainly reflect in your site’s performance by working on one or several of these areas.

Examples:

• new comment
• new post
• updates

Several caching plugins are available for WordPress. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are very popular and effective products.