Everyone wants their web pages to come up lightning fast. There are several reasons they might not – ranging from your internet connection through the number of other users in your area or even the weather conditions – to name but a few. Despite that, however, I hope the information here will help you to speed up how your site is rendered.

What has helped us at CharlesWorks over the years was to the install the WP Fastest Cache plugin on our websites and recommend our clients install it on their websites. This article proceeds on the assumption you know how to install and activate a plugin in the WordPress dashboard.

Background

Caching is a process that has to do with storing computer data for later use. It occurs in web browsers on our workstations, smart phones, tablets and other devices. Caching helps prevent downloading the same materials over and over and over again. Therefore, it can help speed up the viewing of web pages.

In the context of this post, the caching referred to here is about what would be called the “server side” storing of website pages. In WordPress sites, it takes time and server machine cycles to “look up” your content in your website’s database. Once found, that material is sent to the site visitor’s web browser. Then, most likely, are more lookups. Then, more sending to the browser. This goes on and on and on as pages are rendered.

What the WP Fastest Cache plugin does is save the final result of an entire web page as pure HTML code. It then sends that to the site visitor. After the first time the page is generated and sent out, only that same HTML code on subsequent requests for the same page need be sent. Since no more “on the fly” lookups for page rendering needs to be done on subsequent page requests, pages are rendered much faster with less work on the server. Server side caching is a win-win for the site visitor and the server.

Tip

The WP Fastest Cache plugin works great “out of the box”. However, here’s a a tip for you: immediately after installing the WP Fastest Cache plugin you might want to navigate to all the pages (or as many as practicable) in your site. Doing this will cause the plugin to generate its cached material for each page visitor. This will cause subsequent page visitors to view the cached content their first time visiting those pages in your website.

Remember: once you or anyone visits a page in your website, everyone visiting that page going forward will be viewing the cached content.