There are many ways to optimize your WordPress website, and caching is one of them. Caching plays an important role in website optimization. Things like images, videos, scripts, and fonts can drastically improve your website’s looks and appearance, but at the same time, they increase the website size as well. This thing increases the website’s load time, and users can leave the website if it’s not loaded fastly.
Thankfully, using a caching plugin in your WordPress website can improve the site speed. In this post, I will cover everything related to caching and why you need Caching Plugin for your WordPress website. Here’s an overview:
What Is Caching?
Caching creates a static version of your website and serves it to the visitor. Static pages load quickly in web browsers, which drastically improves the performance of the website.
Whenever someone visited your website, then his/her web browser contacts your Web server. After that, your WordPress installation contacts the database to fetch your posts and other data on your website. In the end, the Web server instantly compiles the data and returns it to the web browsers in an HTML page form.
We can say that your website data travels around three computers to send the information back to the user. Caching can significantly speed up the data transfer between these computers by taking some abbreviations.
When a user visits your website, some of the files like the banner image and static page will get saved on his local drive until you changed something on your website. When that user visits the website, the static page and images that were saved in his browser render, and the website loads up too quickly. This way, the user’s web browsers didn’t re-request each file to load the website, which reduces the server load.
After reading the above statements, you probably get an idea about Caching, and it is important for your Website. Caching is all about reusing the saved data from last requests to speed the rendering of your WordPress website. It minimizes the data that flows between the user’s web Browers and your Website server, which boosts the site speed.
Advantage of WordPress Caching
There are many advantages of caching in WordPress websites. You might think what segments of the blog will speed up after WordPress caching. Let’s find out.
Website Performance
Caching boosts the performance of your website. It saves a static cached file in the user’s web browser, which quickly rendered the website. The browser doesn’t need to re-request each time to load your website.
Reduce Server Load
If you have a limited hosting plan, then Caching will helps a lot as it can save your limited server memory and I/O operation. It also reduces the server load from your hosting.
Speed Up Ranking
Not only users but Search engine also loves that website who loads faster. According to some case study from giant SEOs website gets better PageRank which loads faster than the slower ones. Google also mentioned that Pagespeed is an important factor in the search engine ranking of a website. However, many other factors such as content quality and Off-page SEO also matter in searching engine ranking, but Faster load speed is one of them.
Better User Experience
According to a study by CDN, most people leave the web page if it’s not loads in 2 seconds or less. When you use Caching on your website, it improves the site speed, which attracts visits. It gives a better user experience, and the user will be more likely to revisit your website if it’s loads quickly.
There are several ways to enable caching in your WordPress, and the caching plugin is one of the simplest ways. Some of them are free and premium as well, depending on your requirement.
Types of WordPress Caching
There are two types of caching protocols, which are – Client-Side Caching and Server Side Caching.
Client-Side caching
Apart from content, a website contains static data like images, CSS, Javascript files, and much more. In Client-side caching, the static data get saves in the user’s browser, and it will not re-download the data every time he/she refreshes the webpage. This reusing of the static data from the user’s computer to improve the site performance is called Client-Side Caching. In the present time, the majority of the website uses this technique to improve their performance, and each major browser supports Client-side Caching. It will not only saves website server resources but also helps in preventing data redundancy as well.
Server-Side Caching
Server-side caching is done at the server-side, including several caching protocols to improve the overall site performance. I will not go it deep to make you confused, but Database query caching, Opcode caching, Page caching comes in Server Side caching. In simple words, we can say that proper server Side caching provides loads up less work for the server and speeds up the server response time, which enhances the overall website performance.
Best WordPress Caching Plugins
The best WordPress Caching Plugins are:
- Litespeed Cache
- WP Rocket
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- WP-Optimize
- Autoptimize
Conclusion
So it was the post about why you need a caching plugin for WordPress. If you’re not using a caching plugin on your website, it is the correct time to start using one. Having a caching plugin loads your website fastly which attracts visits and search engine ranking as well.
For your satisfaction, simply benchmark your website performance before and after using a cache plugin into your website. You can also do this with the best caching plugins to find the best one. I’m pretty sure that you will get amazing benchmark results after WordPress caching.
If you have any queries or suggestions regarding WordPress caching, you can ask us in the comment section. Also, let us know which Cache plugin you use in your WordPress website and why?
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Anuj is a passionate blogger from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. Currently pursuing B.sc in Programming and Data Science from IIT Madras. Apart from being an avid learner and a tech enthusiast, he loves playing PC Games and likes to keep himself updated with the latest trends in the tech industry.
