Why it’s important to use a WordPress caching plugin
Contents
Why it’s important to use a WordPress caching plugin
- What is Cache?
- Why is caching important?
- SiteGround caching Plugin
- WP Rocket Plugin
- It’s Speed that matters
- SiteGround Speed test
- WP Rocket Speed test
- Final Conclusion
1. What is Cache?
In this guide I will not only inform you but show you why it so important that every WordPress site needs a caching plugin. Caching is used to boost the speed of each page that loads when your visitors visit them.
WordPress is a dynamic content management system and this means that that each time a webpage is visited WordPress gets the required information from a database. It takes several steps for the information to get from the database to the user’s web browser. So, if you have many users at your website at the same time this can slow the server response as its now got to get the same information from the database for each user.
This is where caching plugin comes into its own. Once a user has been to one of your pages it’s loads that page into the server’s memory and keeps it there for the next visitor and WordPress does not have to go to the database time and time again to get the same information.
2. Why is caching important?
There are several reasons why caching is vitally important.
It reduces the load of the hosting server which then makes it run faster. Google take notes of websites than load fast and this is why one of Googles latest algorisms focus on. It wants the best user’s experience and Google gives any websites an SEO boost for fast loading times.
There are many caching plugins and I will only focus two here in this guide. One is from the Hosting company SiteGround I use and the second is Premium plugin WP Rocket.
3. SiteGround caching Plugin
SiteGround as a hosting company has four premium features that will make your website super-fast.
The first, MEMCACHED, Memcached is an object caching mechanism designed to improve the connection between your application and its database. It greatly improves the loading speed of dynamic content that can’t be served by the Dynamic Caching (checkout pages, dashboards and backends, etc).
The second, NGINX DIRECT DELIVERY, With NGINX Direct Delivery it will serve most of the static resources of your website (images, JS, CSS and others) directly through NGINX to achieve the fastest possible loading time. It works for all kind of applications without additional customisation.
The Third, DYNAMIC CACHE, The Dynamic Cache is a full-page caching mechanism for non-static resources. It prevents unnecessary database queries, processing of each page visit, and more. It highly improves your loading speed and the TTFB (time to first byte) of your pages. For WordPress sites the best dynamic cache results are achieved if you also install the SG Optimizer plugin.
And Finally, Cloudflare, content delivery network (CDN) will cache your website content and will distribute it over multiple data centres around the world. When someone visits your site, the content will be delivered from the closest server to your visitor and this will make your website loads faster than ever in every part of the world!
All these are configured within the WordPress plug they provide. There are other benefits that the plugin provides and that’s GZIP Compression which is enabled by default automatically saving you bandwidth and improving the loading speeds of your pages. Lazy Loading images which loads the images on the webpages only when the user get to them on the page and not all at the beginning.
4. WP Rocket Plugin
WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins for WordPress you will get. It comes at a price but for good reason as it does amazing job at speeding up your website.
It takes advantage of SiteGround technology with Memcached, NGINX Direct Delivery and Cloudflare with its plugin. With one click WP Rocket turns on gzip compression, cache pre-loading, page cache and starts loading all pages into memory.
It also has advance setting for Lazy Load images, CDN, minification and more.
5. It’s Speed that matters
Lets have a look each plugins speeds on my website. We use google pagespeed insights test page to check the speed of our website.
6. SiteGround Speed test
We started with SiteGround plugin configure using all of the features turned on. Here are the results. Mobile scored 39 and Desktop scored 72.
7. WP Rocket Speed test
Now for WP Rocket plugin configure using all of the features turned on and also using SiteGround caching features turned on as well. Here are the results. Mobile scored 88 and Desktop scored 97.
8. Final Conclusion
Not all caching plugins are created equal. It’s worth paying for a plugin that provides the best result for you. Hopefully this have informed and shown you what a caching plugin can do for your website.
This is why we at webdesign4u have taken the time to test out the best plugins. We have also taken the time to test them together and try extensively check each setting of them both to produce the best out comes on each website design we do.