Do you have a website?
How fast does it load for you visitors to see?
Have you ever run a website speed test for your own WordPress site?
Are you aware of the fact that ‘Caching’ can be a solution to your slow loading woes?
How do you choose the right WordPress caching solution for your website?
You might be a new website owner or an experienced one running more than a single website. In both these cases, we will assume that you are aware of the significant importance that your website speed holds. If you are not, you should probably know that as per statistics, half of the web users and even more tend to abandon a website if it does not load within 2 seconds.
Alright! 2 seconds might sound like a little digital exaggeration but if your website loading time is over 3 seconds, you better shut your website down, if you are not going to do anything about it. If you want to be corrective of your WordPress website’s speed, the best way to go about a slow website is to introduce ‘Caching’ into its mechanism.
Caching; simply explained
Explained simply, ‘Caching’ helps your website load faster by letting the server skip the processing part and loading multiple requests, pages, scripts, etc. when your website is visited repeatedly.
In an even simpler way- When a visitor lands on your website for the first time ever, the Server takes its own time to process and load the latest content from your site, pull up the header, footer, icons, sidebar widgets, etc.
Finally, the retrieved content is sent to your web browser in the form of the website’s home page or any other page you requested.
However, when you repeatedly visit the same website, the server plays smart (if caching is in place) and provides you with a cached copy of the website which is stored with it in the form of an already prepared HTML file.
Why should I bring ‘Caching’ to my website?
If the above galore of information isn’t sufficient for you to get convinced, we have a few more reasons to help you ease the transition.
Firstly, you should do it for the sake of Search Engine rankings! If your website is powered through caching, that would mean that more and more people are able to access it without facing any speed issues. Stable traffic on a website is well appreciated by the Google algorithm and is also well-rewarded in the form of spiked ratings.
Once your website begins experiencing a high amount of traffic, you would want to make it secure so that the data exchanged through isn’t compromised. To do so, you will have to consider migrating the website to https in order to make it secure from various threats.
Secondly, the basic improvements that ‘Caching’ could bring to your website are speed and performance. After all, who doesn’t want a fast-loading and robust website! If you are planning to start blogging or set up a new website, this is the right time to learn about Caching so that you can accelerate the loading speed of your website/blog.
If at all, how & on what basis should I choose my Caching tool/service?
There; you have brought up a great question!
So, how do you weigh if a particular Caching solution is going to be the most suitable for your website(s)? Well, here’s a checklist:
The Costing of WordPress Caching Solution
Comparing the cost should be your priority while choosing or investing in a Coaching service. There are plenty of players in the market who provide tempting features in an affordable range. Most importantly, you should pick the one with the maximum features even if you have to spare a few extra dollars.
The more, the merrier
Choose a solution that is powerful and provides great functionalities. Go for a plugin that provides additional features such as:
- Content delivery networks (CDN)
- GZIP compression
- Enable page exemption from Caching
- Minification for compressing the static files; saves bandwidth
- Page Caching
- Static Files Compression
- Cache Preloading
- Browser Caching
- Database caching (For complex database queries)
- Object caching(For complex database queries)
Minimal Configuration
If you are a non-technical user, you probably consider configuring software and tool as a ‘pain’. Setting up a new plugin can be a complex task. However, the right caching tool will give you no configuration blues. So, always choose the one that features minimal configuration.
Customer support
Last but not the least, an efficient caching solution will provide you with around-the-clock support in case of an unfortunate event.
So, now that you are all geared up to speed up your WordPress website and introduce the mechanism of Caching into it, there are questions about choosing the right Caching tool. Read on to know more about the options available.
Reviews
It is always a smarter decision if you go through reviews from certified plugin users to help you ensure that the tool really works as promised.
Read on to know more about the options available:
1. WordPress tools/Plugins
Since WordPress has been touted to be the most favored CMS for the past few years and even for the ones to come, we believe that the several plugins and extensions provided by it are power-packed. Similarly, if you are running a WordPress website and are interested in choosing the best solution for it, WordPress Caching plugins are the way to go.
2. Get the Caching service provided by your web host
If you have invested in a decent web hosting service, chances are that your web host provider pretty much provides a good caching service as well. If so, you will get assisted support when it comes to troubleshooting. If you go with it, you can expect to achieve unmatched website speed and better performance. You can get in touch with the support forum of your web host to enquire about the same.
Conclusion:
Simply put, Caching is the simplest and the most effective solution to speeding up your website and gaining steps as you rank higher on search engine results. We hope that the detailed information furnished by us in the blog post above will be helpful for you to choose an efficient and decent Caching solution for your website.
If you would have any queries regarding the same, kindly drop them in the comment below.
Author:
Pawan Sahu is the founder of MarkupTrend. He is a Digital Marketer and a blogger geek passionate about writing articles related to WordPress, SEO, Marketing, Web Design, CMS etc. You can tweet Pawan @impawansahu
