What The Heck Is A Cache? And why is it important for a fast website?
There are many different types of caches and you don’t need to understand all of them to take advantage of its power. However, if you want to get the most out of caching, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of how it works.
Every time you visit a webpage or refresh it, your browser requests the content from the webserver. If the content is not in the cache, your browser has to send a request to the server, wait for a response, and then display the content. This process can take anywhere from a few milliseconds to several seconds, depending on the size of the page and the speed of your internet connection. However, caching can speed up the loading of web pages by up to 50%.
Caching And Mobile Devices
Caching is especially important for mobile devices because they have limited memory and bandwidth. When a mobile website loads slowly, users are more likely to abandon the page. Mobile devices account for about 56% of web traffic today. Of that 56%, 20% use iOS phones, 16% use Android phones, and 38% use other mobile devices. This means that a larger percentage of mobile users are using iPhones or Android phones, which have better browsers and optimized caches.
Caching And More Customer Conversions
According to a 2017 survey by Zendesk, two-thirds of customers abandon a purchase process because of a frustrating user experience. If you’re trying to sell something online, whether it be an app, service, or physical goods, poor web performance is the last thing you want to inflict on your customers.
Fast websites aren’t just important for e-commerce, they’re also an important part of search engine optimization (SEO). Browsers like to show websites that load quickly in their search results because users prefer fast sites and Google ranks them higher. This means more visitors and more conversions for you!
This is where caching comes in! By taking a snapshot of your content and storing it on a CDN (content delivery network), the cached version appears when users visit your site or refresh it. That way, if they come back and refresh their browser, the cached version will load much more quickly than if they’ve never seen it before.
This is particularly beneficial for WordPress users because you can take advantage of an incredibly popular caching plugin like W3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache speeds up WordPress by caching both the static files and the dynamic content. There are also other caching plugins and your hosting service might be offering this already!
Caching Plugins also minifies and compresses your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files to reduce the size of those files. This can result in a 2x-10x performance improvement for your website!
In Conclusion caching is an incredibly important tool for optimizing your website. By understanding how it works, you can take advantage of its benefits and improve the performance of your website for your users.
Thanks for reading!