Provide a Better User Experience By Leveraging Caching & Utilizing CDNs
If you’re utilizing WordPress as your CMS, you have the option of using a caching plug-in, which can greatly increase performance. Two of the most popular – which are also endorsed by WordPress.org – include W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
If your search engine optimization efforts pay off, you’re going to see a significant increase in the amount of traffic to your website. The easiest way to make a web surfer think that they made a bad decision about visiting your website is to have a website that loads too slowly and that doesn’t offer them the kind of snappy response that people with broadband connections expect. Caching can help to reduce the load on your server and can make your webpage a lot more available to people when they come to visit.
What Kind of WordPress Caching To Use
There are two types of caching you can do: browser caching and server caching.
Browser caching utilizes the visitor’s own browser to reduce the load on your server. Essentially, this type of caching takes the static elements of your webpage – which usually include the headers, footers and so forth – and caches them on the visitor’s computer so that their browser doesn’t request a fresh copy every time they load a page. This is an ideal solution for websites that are getting a moderately high amount of traffic. If the amount of traffic that you get spikes to very high levels, however, you will want to look at server caching as a better option.
Unless you have an extremely busy website, you should be able to get away with using a single server for caching. For the most trafficked websites in the world, however, multiple servers are oftentimes employed for this purpose, but it’s unlikely that most businesses – even very busy businesses – will need to go this far.
Server caching is very similar to browser caching, except that the server is employed to provide the cash of static elements. This reduces the amount of calls that browsers have to make to construct active content and to load content that never really changes.
Implementing Caching for WordPress
As far as server caching goes, you want to have an experienced professional implement this for you. Browser caching, however, can be implemented by simply installing one of the aforementioned plug-ins and configuring them so that you reduce the load on your server. You may not notice the benefits until you start to get quite a bit of traffic, but they will be there and it will make a difference in terms of your visitor experience.
CDNs (Content Delivery Networks)
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) comprises of a widely spread out network of servers around the world. When you subscribe to a CDN service, some of your static website files like images, JavaScripts, and stylesheets are replicated very fast throughout dozens of servers around the world. Your website visitor is then served the requested files from a server closest to their physical location. This results in (a) greatly increased web browsing speeds and (b) reduced load on your webserver. When properly configured, a CDN can be very useful in providing excellent user experience.
