Rest assured, it's not about hiding your blog, or making it unavailable. For these cases, we have already written tutorials on it and for more precision it is about make a private blog. Which is not the same as caching a blog (or use the cache on a WordPress blog).
As a savvy website owner, I'm sure you understand how much it is important for your website to load quickly. And if your website uses WordPress, you've probably at least heard of the need to cache it.
The " Caching "(Or caching) is a critical aspect of your website's performance, in that it can dramatically improve loading times.
In simple terms, a caching plugin creates a static version of your website when a visitor lands on it; and then serve this static version to the next visitor. Thanks to this, your website loads faster and this has a lot of advantages.
There are a lot of articles around the importance of website loading speed. A fast-loading website provides a better overall user experience and leads to more engagement as well as best conversion rates.
Even Google has announced that website load times will play a role in terms of ranking on search engine results. Also, studies show that if a website takes more than two seconds to load, visitors are more likely to give up and go elsewhere.
To find out where you are now, testing the speed of your website is a good idea. Let's take a look at a couple of tools that can help you achieve this:
But before you start, take the time to take a look at How to install a WordPress theme, How many plugins to install on WordPress.
Then let's get to work!
Pingdom Tools summarizes the performance of your website in four parameters:
- Quality of performance
- queries
- Loading time
- Page size
The most important parameter is, of course, the loading time. When Google visits your website, the loading speed is one of the first things bots look at.
See also: How to prevent Google from indexing a WordPress page
Another tool that can help you determine the speed of your website is YSlow.
YSlow is available as a browser extension. It works by analyzing your page and telling you why it's slow. It generates a list of suggestions and tweaks you can implement to reduce loading time to improve the overall user experience.
However, knowing how fast your blog is is only part of the battle. In order to provide an optimal user experience, you should take advantage of WordPress caching and do whatever it takes to improve your website's load time.
What is WordPress caching?
When someone visits a page on your website, they request a lot of information from your web host. These requests include images, javascript and CSS, and they also need to fetch your content from the WordPress database.
Essentially, this is what happens:
- Any user visits your website and browser contacts the server.
- Your WordPress installation queries to the database where it is installed to retrieve your articles and other data.
- The web server then compiles this data into an HTML page and sends it back to the user.
Since WordPress generates dynamic content, this means that it requests fresh information on a page every time a visitor views a page. In most cases, this is unnecessary especially since your blog posts and pages don't change once they're published unless you edit them manually.
When you use a caching plugin, it creates a static version of your content and offers it to your visitors, which means that when the same visitors come to your website again, they will see the cached version, which should be much faster.
In a nutshell, caching reuses data from previous requests to speed up future requests. It minimizes the amount of data that must flow between the browser, the database and the web server which results in faster loading times.
How does WordPress caching work?
There are two main types of caching protocols available, based on the client-server model: client-side caching and server-side caching.
1. Client-side caching
Each website has a lot of static data such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript files. Whichever browser you use, they're all smart enough to know that once these files are downloaded, they don't have to be re-downloaded every time you visit the same website. They simply serve these files from the local cache that is stored on your computer's hard drive. that's why it is recommended to clean your browser's cache.
2. Server-side cache
The server-side cache includes all the different caching protocols that are used on WordPress. They include the following elements:
- The page cache
- The database cache (requests)
- Object-based caching
- The opcode caching
Let's take a look at each of them individually to see how they can help you speed up your website.
The cache of the page
The page cache is the simplest of all caching protocols. It refers to the process of saving dynamically generated HTML files to the hard drive or server memory and uses them for future requests. This saves PHP code execution time and queries to the MySQL database.
Database cache
The purpose of the database is to store, update, and provide data efficiently. The databases are usually huge and each request takes a significant amount of time. Since WordPress relies heavily on its database, it queries from time to time.
Read also: How to backup a WordPress database
If this data is not changed in the database, running queries to retrieve the same data will be repeated over and over again for data that does not change. To prevent this from happening, it makes sense to save the results of a query to local storage. This is known as database caching and it is one of the fundamental factors of caching in WordPress that makes it efficient.
Object-based caching
WordPress has its own internal cache system that includes several subsystems such as the Caching API ", Cache object and transient API. This caching system can be controlled by plugins to reduce the number of database calls.
Cache Opcode
Opcode cache refers to saving the PHP code compiled between each request. WordPress uses PHP which is an object oriented programming language. This means that for a PHP code to be executed, a PHP compiler must compile the first code and generate the executable code which will be executed by the web server.
Do not hesitate to read our article on How to duplicate a WordPress database with phpMyAdmin
In other words, the opcode cache stores the output of the PHP compiler in the cache.
Caching: some WordPress plugins to get there
There are a lot of caching plugins on WordPress and they do a little more than just cache your pages. Some of them include other features such as GZIP, CSS, HTML and JavaScript compression, CDNs, and more.
Keep in mind that you should always disable and purge the cache when making changes to the WordPress theme of your website. This ensures that you have the latest version of the pages and not a cache.
We therefore recommend a few plugins and tutorials to achieve this:
1. Humminbird
Hummingbird is a plugin that will help you optimize your website to load faster. When you activate Hummingbird, it shows you your website's score on a scale of 100, which gives you a breakdown of what you need to improve. The suggestions are easy to understand and include a list of the specific files you need to edit, as well as the images you need to compress, so you can get started right away.
Also consult the 5 maintenance services for your WordPress blog
It is similar to the tool Page Speed From Google, but the difference is that it gives you explanations using terminology you can actually understand and eliminates the need to manually find and replace files that are causing load time issues. . All changes are done with one click and all optimizations can easily be undone.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
2. WP Fastest Cache
WP Fastest Cache is a WordPress Plugin cache that offers almost anything a user might want. The developers of this plugin claim that it is the easiest and fastest WP Cache system. And to be honest, it is! With over 300 active installs, this plugin provides a fast browsing experience for visitors.
Plus, it's easy to install and super easy to use. This plugin uses the rewrite mod to create static HTML files based on the dynamism of WordPress. Better yet, it automatically changes the .htacces file.
Read also our article on 7 WordPress plugins to combat spam
In addition, it offers cache timeout feature. Which means that all cached files will be deleted at a time determined by you.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
3. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WordPress plugin premium caching on the market. This is the simplest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin, which is very useful if you don't know the technical terms used for different caching options.
It allows users to instantly cache their website with one click. Its robot automatically retrieves your WordPress pages to build up the cache, then it automatically activates recommended WordPress caching settings, such as gzip compression, page cache, and cache preloading.
Discover also our 10 WordPress plugins for firewalls to optimize the security of your website
WP Rocket also includes optional features that you can enable to further improve performance. Including Lazy Loading images, CDN support, DNS prefetching, minification, etc.
Download | Demo | Web hosting
Recommended Resources
Find out about other recommended resources to help you build and manage your website.
- How to configure W3 Total Cache for WordPress
- How to configure WP Super Cache for WordPress
- 5 CDN to improve the performance of your blog
- 10 Plugins to optimize images of your WordPress blog
Conclusion
Here ! That's it for this tutorial, I hope it will give you more information on WordPress caching. Do not hesitate to share with your friends on your favorite social networks.
However, you can also consult our resources, if you need more elements to carry out your projects of creation of Internet sites, by consulting our guide on WordPress blog creation.
If you have suggestions or remarks, leave them in our section Comments.
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