WordPress is the CMS of choice for many people (including ours, of course) because of its flexibility and popularity. However, because it is dynamic and requires interacting with a database, site owners often suffer from slow sites. As a result, WordPress site owners typically have to apply a host of speed optimization techniques and tools to increase their site’s page speed. One of the most popular and most effective ways to speed up a site is to utilize caching.
Caching is the process of creating and serving a static version of your content.
Here’s a website dedicated entirely to illustrating the concept of caching.
This post will review the two major pitfalls of WordPress caching plugins, and then look at how Strattic solves these issues. Some of the most popular caching plugins include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, and WP Super Cache. If you’re wondering how much these plugins cost, you can check out our post about how much it costs to optimize a WordPress website.
#1 Over-caching
Most caching plugins offer many features to help speed up your site, and it’s very tempting to check all the boxes. It requires a certain level of expertise to know which features to utilize without doing damage to your site.
Not seeing changes in the front-end
If you overcache your site, changes to posts or pages may not appear in the front-end of the site. To resolve this, you’d need to delete the cache through the plugin, or set up shorter expiration times for the cache (which may not be ideal, because the whole point of caching is to have users see a cached version of the site).
But, even after deleting the cache through the site, site visitors still may not see the latest changes yet since the browser might still be showing a cached version of the site. In order to see a change appear immediately, the visitor would need to manually clear their browser cache (again, not an ideal scenario).
Minification
Many caching plugins offer to minify your CSS, JS, and HTML.
While compressing these files can help with site speed, it can also break the styling or functionality on your site. Yikes!
Figuring out how much to cache your site can be a delicate balancing act.
#2 Under-caching
Although you don’t want to overcache, you don’t want to undercache either. Undercaching could result in the site still using too many resources and not improving the performance of the site.
The Strattic way
Strattic is the ultimate cache, and the most aggressive caching you can have. No need for other types of caching when a site is running on Strattic. The reason for this is that caching essentially generates static versions of pages on the site. Strattic is all static, all the time.
And in addition to the static goodness, Strattic runs over an integrated CDN and supports http/2 for additional speed boosts. Supersonic speed FTW!
in Jerusalem, Israel