Why improper caching is slowing down your Wordpress website
TLDR: Use CacheRocket Wordpress plugin to guarantee your page loads extremely fast, all the time.
Wordpress. Is. Awesome.
I don’t believe those words as a software developer, but if there is one thing they have done that inspires awe, it’s their market presence. Almost half of the internet runs on Wordpress and you can like it or not, but both sides of the Wordpress river of plugins have to agree that it’s an enormous river that has stood the test of time.
However, nothing this big comes without its flaws and slow Wordpress websites are more the rule rather than the exception. One of the main reasons being that cold pages take some time to get loaded and rendered, especially for those of you Wordpress smithy’s that like using a lot of cool plugins.
No one likes a slow page. Not Wordpress, not you, not your users. If ever there was a lose-lose-lose situation, this is it. We have found the end of the resource consumption rainbow.
How to fix a slow Wordpress page
Let us start at the beginning. Seems like a proper place to start to me. Not only Wordpress websites can be slow. Any webpage that needs to load a bunch of resources is slow when it has to start cold.
I’ve mentioned cold starts before, but let me elaborate slightly on what I mean. Normally a web page doesn’t have to reload all of its resources (static assets for the techies out there) every time someone visits the page. Nowadays, caching is implemented almost everywhere by default at hosting solution providers. In a nutshell, what happens with caching is that after the first load of the page, static assets are kept in a cache, which you should think of as, well, an old school cache. It stores essential necessities, in this case your static assets, so it’s available when needed, rather than having to go all the way back to town to buy a bottle of water. Serving your page from a cache is many, MANY times faster.
Now, caches don’t keep information forever. If enough time has passed without anyone needing your page, the assets are ditched and the next time someone visits your page, it’s a cold start again.
Your SLOWPOKE is evolving!
Enter the cache warmers
You heard that right. These babies keep your cache all warm and toasty, even on a dark winter night.
Cache warmers are automated systems that call your page every so often, before the cache timer runs out on your assets. Every time a call is made to your page, the cache serves all the necessary assets and resets the timer on when to delete them. Isn’t that convenient? This way, you can always serve your users a blazing fast page, always from the cache.
Which cache warmer to choose
If you look for cache warmers on the Wordpress plugin market, you will find a ton of them. Trying them all out one by one is going to be time consuming and tedious. So I will give you my take on which cache warmer I think works the best for your Wordpress website.
Right off the bat I can tell you that most of the cache warmer plugins you’ll find run on Wordpress themselves. This might sound cozy and snug, your website and plugins all sharing the same resource blanket, but it’s not. The blanket is not big enough and keeping it stretched to cover everyone on the sofa takes a lot of resources. And while they’re all fighting for a piece of that snuggly goodness, there isn’t much attention left for the page. So it becomes slooooowwwww.
What you want is a plugin that is lightweight and does all of the heavy work on another server. To this end, you will find only two plugins that do that and the one that I found works the best by far is CacheRocket. It’s fast, has a free tier (and is cheap for the paid plans) and is fully up to date with Wordpress’ strict plugin security rules and coding standards. It runs on an external server, so it doesn’t consume your Wordpress resources! Check out their page if you want to know more.
Conclusion
Keeping your Wordpress page fast by using a cache warmer is a solid strategy and CacheRocket is the best cache warmer Wordpress plugin I have found to date.
