In this article, we are going to see what is WordPress caching.
What is WordPress caching?
The WordPress caching is the way of improving performance. If the site is getting too many hits, you can enable WordPress caching by installing W3 Cache or WP Super Cache.
When a website is requested repeatedly from different clients, reusing the previously generated data (or requests such as database queries) to speed up new requests is called WordPress caching.
Purging the cache
Purging the cache essentially means re-caching all previously cached data. This means the old ones are deleted and new ones are created or regenerated. This typically takes place based on a number of protocols – some of which include:
1) When a comment is posted
2) When a new post is published
3) When an old post is updated
The Benefits of WordPress Caching
The major benefits of the WordPress caching involve the following.
1) Speeding up the website
2) Better search engine rankings
3) Save some of the server’s resource consumption
Types of WordPress Caching
There are two primary types of caching protocols available, based on the client-server model. They are:
1) Client-Side caching
2) Server-Side caching
Client-Side caching
A website contains a lot of non-textual, static data, such as images, CSS and Javascript files. Once they’re downloaded, your browser is smart enough not to re-download them every time you hit the F5 button. It simply serves that data from the local cache – i.e. the cached data saved in your computer’s hard disk. That’s why it’s recommended to clean your browser’s cache every once in a while, – it saves a lot of space and improves performance. This process of reusing the cached data from the client’s computer (or client’s end) is known as client-side caching and almost every modern website uses it and every browser supports it. Client-side caching helps prevent data redundancy (i.e. downloading the same data over and over again) and saves a lot of server resources
Server-Side Caching
Caching at the server is known as server-side caching. Server-side caching includes various caching protocols that are used for WordPress caching. They are listed below:
1) Page caching
2) Database query caching
3) Object based caching
4) Opcode caching
Page caching
Page caching is the simplest of all the caching protocols. It simply refers to the process of saving the dynamically generated HTML files in the server’s hard disk or memory (RAM). It is known as the cache. Then it will be serving from the cache (i.e. reusing previously generated data) whenever a request is made. This saves the overhead of executing PHP code and MySQL database queries.
Database query caching
The databases will consume more resources. They can be called as the heart of every company. The database is used to store, update, and deliver data efficiently. Since they’re usually huge, each query takes time (usually in the order of a few hundred microseconds). In the case of databases, better the hardware, faster the query result generation. Since WordPress is heavily reliant on its database, it makes a query many times. When data isn’t being altered in the database and queries are made to retrieve the same data it is like re-downloading the same images. Therefore, saving the results of a query in the local storage will save time and resources. The saving of database queries’ results in local storage which is called database caching and is one of the fundamental factors in WordPress caching.
When the database is updated, like when a post is updated or published, or a comment is submitted, it is required that the previously saved database cache to be deleted and re-caching the database query results again.
Object based caching
WordPress has an internal caching system which includes several subsystems (i.e. the Caching API, Object Cache, and Transient API). The WordPress core allows plugins to control this caching system to reduce the number of database calls.
Opcode caching
Like the database caching, opcode caching refers to the saving of the compiled PHP code between every request. PHP is an object oriented programming language. For a PHP code to execute, the PHP compiler must compile the code first and generate the executable code for the webserver to execute.
Installation
We are going to use one of the most popular free WordPress caching plugins. It is WP Super Cache.
Like every plugin, this can be installed by two methods.
The DEUA way – Download, Extract, Upload & Activate
Steps:
1) Download the WP Super Cache plugin from the WordPress plugin repository
2) Extract the archive
3) Upload the extracted to the wp_content/plugins/ folder via FTP using an FTP client such as FileZilla
4) Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress dashboard and activate the plugin
This method is somewhat slower. The easy method is to search and install in WordPress.
Search and Install
In this method, follow the below steps to install the plugin.
1) Navigate to the Plugins > Add New page in the WP dashboard
2) Search for “wp super cache”
3) Hit Install
4) Press on Activate
5) Finished
This is how installing the WP Super Cache Plugin. Now we can configure the plugin to achieve the caching.
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