Improving the loading time and performance of your WordPress Website must be a priority. There are already plenty of tutorials about how to optimize and speed up WordPress. But sometimes, performance optimization quickly becomes technical, especially when it comes to caching.
That is why I’ll focus on caching plugins and how to use them to speed up your website.
Before going to the list, let’s have a small recap about the importance of caching in WordPress.
Caching is the best way to speed up WordPress websites. Caching creates static copies of your pages and posts and display it to visitors. Static content is loaded more quickly because it limits the amount of requests generated between WordPress and your database.
That’s mainly why caching a website leads to faster performance. The easiest way to enable caching in WordPress is by means of plugins.
” We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet. “
Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts (Source: Using site speed in web search ranking)
Using a caching plugin has so many benefits. It’s excellent for user experience, search engine optimization and can help your serveur to deal with traffic spikes.
User experience: cached websites load faster than dynamic database queries. This is important because 40% of visitors leave a website that takes more than 3s to load (Source: How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line).
SEO: Google’s algorithm significantly takes site speed into account to define search rankings.
Traffic spikes: Caching also helps reduce the load on your serveur to preserve server memory and prevent downtimes from happening. If you don’t have a good WordPress Managed hosting, cash plugins can save your website life.
The process of loading a site can be summarized in 5 steps:
It is therefore a complex round trip between the browser and your hosting provider involving many exchanges with your database.
The loading time is therefor determined by two criteria: the size of the files to be processed and the number of requests to your database.
We can explain, in a very simplified way, why a WordPress site load slowly with this formula: (total file size) x (number of requests) x (the performance of your web host) = loading time
If you have time and want to understand everything about performance optimization for WordPress, take a look at this article: How to Speed up Your WordPress Site (Ultimate 2020 Guide).
It’s the most comprehensive guide on performance optimization for WordPress available on the internet, but it’s (too) long.
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