Why Your WordPress Site Needs a Caching Plugin

We all know that one of the factors that make a website successful is speed. Let’s face it. People do not appreciate waiting around for web pages to load. In fact, most people expect web pages to load in 2 seconds or less and are more likely to exit a page if it takes a while to load. 47% of consumers expect for a website to load in 2 seconds or less while 40% of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to Akamai.

It’s only obvious that if you want to decrease your page abandonment rate, you will have to lessen your page loading time as well.

Your first thought to that businesses might have shrinked the file size of this websites. That cannot be further from the truth. Today’s websites not only have texts as their content, but now have images, videos, fonts and even scripts ramping up the data downloads.

This is where caching comes in.

What is Caching?

Caching is, quite literally, the process of temporarily storing data which is frequently-accessed in a cache. A cache is what you would typically call a collection.

To put it simply, when visitors access your site, they are essentially requesting information from the web host. These requests include files from your website such as images, fonts, scripts, HTML, PHP files and content found on your posts and pages. The server, then, collects all these data and serves it to your visitors.

Now, WordPress generates these content dynamically to ensure that every request sent will yield fresh information about a post or a page every time a visitor views it. While this means that visitors get served up-to-date website information, this also means a longer than usual page loading time.

As a solution to this, caching plugins were made.

How Do Caching Plugins Work?

A caching plugin works by creating a static version of your web page and serves it to visitors since your pages and posts are unlikely to be changed once you published them, barring site redesign or content update. Your visitors are, literally, served a cached version of your web page minimizing the amount of data being sent to your visitor’s browser which lessens the page loading time.

But what if you update your site with new content and information? No worries. Your caching plugin will empty itself, deleting the old cached version, and cache the updated version of your web pages.

Types of Caching

To have a better understanding of how caching works, you have to know that there are two (2) types of caching:

Server-side

The server-side caching also has several types:

• Database query caching. This type caches single-type queries to your database and store it to your server until your update an existing post, change WordPress settings, publish a new post or page.
• Mobile caching. This type caching creates a dedicated cache file for your mobile devices making it easier for your visitors who use their mobiles to visit your site to access your site faster.
• User caching. This type of caching creates dedicated cache files for each WordPress users who log in. This means that a separate cache file will be stored for each user who logs in to your website as opposed to regular visitors who aren’t logged in to your site receiving a cached version of your site.
• Page caching. Page caching is the most basic type which involves saving data on the server’s hard disk and serving them to your visitors every time they request access.
• Opcode caching. This type of caching compiles code requests since all PHP pages on your site must be compiled into code that any device used to access your website can execute.
• Object-based caching. This type of caching is an internal caching system by WordPress. You can control this by using plugins to reduce the number of database calls.

Client-side

Client-side caching is when your browser store all these static content to itself saving it the time to download data every time you decide to visit a site you have already visited before. These information are saved to a local cache found on your PC’s hard drive.

Why You Need a Caching Plugin

Imagine your website not having any caching system at all. That would translate to your visitors having to download your website every single time they visit which in turn increasing page loading time and, quite possibly, your page bounce rate. An increasing bounce rate may affect your SEO rankings.

This makes caching a necessary element to any website ensuring that returning visitors to your site are allowed faster access to your content. And with cahing plugins in place, this speeds things up further.

Are You Ready to Install a Caching Plugin?

Because the site loading speed is vital to the success of your site, it’s important to install a caching plugin if you haven’t already have one installed.

If you feel like this is something you can do on your own by researching for the best plugins in the market and comparing them to each before you install.

If you’re not one of the tech-savvy users, but would want to make sure you have a caching in place, then that’s not a problem. SiteSpot installs and configures caching for you so you do not have to worry about your site speed so you can sit back and relax while we do the work for you.