How to Select the Best Caching Solution for Your WordPress Website

We don’t need statistics to tell us that users hate to wait for a website to load. But, if you insist, Kissmetrics found that around 47 percent of users expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds and around 40 percent abandon sites if they fail to load completely in three seconds. What do people expect, really? If this was not enough, Google has started including website speed in their algorithm to determine search engine rankings since 2010. In simple words, websites need to be fast – really fast.

So, how long does your site take to load? If you have the answer to the question then skip the next part. For those who are blissfully unaware of the loading speed of their site, stop whatever you are doing (including reading this article), and test the speed of your website now. You can use tools like Monitis, Uptime Robot, Pingdom, etc. to understand where you stand.

Now, let’s take a quick look at some techniques that can help you enhance the speed of your WordPress website:

Optimizing images and videos
Minimizing the use of plugins
Optimizing CSS and JavaScript
Integrating CDN and Caching solutions, etc.

While each of these techniques can make your website faster, today, we will look at ways to select the best caching solution for your WordPress website.

Caching

Let’s begin with understanding what caching is all about.

In caching, static versions of your web pages are created and stored on a caching server located between the user and your web server. Therefore, when a user accesses a page on your site, the request is first sent to the caching server. It checks out the information that is available in its cache and forwards it to the user’s terminal. In this process, the web server is kept out of the loop. This reduces the request-fulfillment time and keeps the web server free for other processes.