The best WordPress premium themes in the world can’t do anything about people’s sometimes slow Internet connections or very heavy amounts of traffic. Caching, however, can. Caching means saving a copy of a page on your site in a form that is faster to load than the way that WordPress normally loads pages. Let’s take a look at how pages normally load and you’ll see why.
How WP Makes a Page
When you visit a WordPress site, you don’t actually go to the page in the same way you turn to a page in a book. That is to say, the page really isn’t there until you request it. The WordPress platform takes pieces of data from your server and puts them together into the page your visitor wants and then serves it up to them. This process usually only takes far less than a second, but it can get slow if there are a lot of viewers at your page or if your server just slows down for some reason. Caching is a solution to that.
What Caching Is
Caching means that the server builds a static copy of your page and stores it on the server. The page is now permanent, more like the page in the book used as an example above. When someone comes to the site and requests that page, WP checks to see if anything has changed and, if it doesn’t see anything different it just serves up the page from the static copy, avoiding the process of building the page from scratch all over again. The great thing is that only one person has to request the page for this to happen. After one person does, the static copy is built and it’s available on your server until it’s changed.
The Tech
You’ll want to install a plugin for this. The one you’ll see the most is called WP Super Cache and it’s very easy to use. All you have to do is install it on your server and then activate it from the Settings menu. Turn caching on and you’re ready to go. What about all those extra files? They don’t count for much in terms of server space. The time you’ll save visitors will be well worth the effort and it’ll take some load off of your server. If your site really does grow as much as you’d like, this will become more important as your raw number of visitors increases.
About author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a leader in the premium WordPress templates area. She likes to discover new ideas about internet marketing, social media and blogging.
