What is Caching?
To have a successful website, it’s important that your pages load as quickly as possible. A website that loads quicker often ranks higher in search results and has a lower bounce rate. Caching is a common way to speed up your website, but caches are used for lots of other things, too.
A cache is temporary data storage for data. Let’s use a website as an example. In a general sense, commonly accessed data (like popular images, files, precompiled PHP scripts, database queries, etc.) is stored in a cache, creating a smaller pool of potential data. When someone requests a webpage, this smaller pool of data is checked first. That way, if the page is in the cache, it can be shown more quickly. If the page isn’t in the cache, the page is served from the regular, uncached website files.
Caching works because if you visit a website (or use a computer file), you’re statistically likely to visit that website again soon and also likely to visit more pages on that website. This is a well-known concept in computer science, and it works to your advantage. Computers often have caches of frequently used files, your browser keeps a cache of your favorite websites, and you can set up caching on your server to make your websites load faster.
Many content management systems have plugins designed just for caching, and there are other utilities, like memecached, which help you optimize your website speed. Before you make changes to your website, we recommend you use an online tool like GTMetrix to check your site’s performance. This will both help you decide what to cache and give you a baseline to see how much your site has improved.
