Every week a new caching plugin gets released but before you jump on each one to try it out, you need to understand how caching works, especially as it is multi-level.
Whenever a request is sent by a user to a specific page, the reply doesn’t come straight from the website. Instead, if the data is fresh, it must be prepared from scratch and that takes time.
By the time it actually arrives with the user, the chances are they’ve gotten fed up and gone to another website.
Full Page Caching
Full page caching is done at different levels:
- Network level
- Server level
- Application level
Network Level
Two excellent examples of full page caching at network level are Cloudflare and Fastly. Both of these implement full page caching before a request even gets to the server where your website lives.
This is down to point of presence being used in multiple locations so that, when a user requests a page, the request goes via Cloudflare or Fastly, to the server.
The Point of Presence (PoP) caches the response for a predetermined time. For example, if the server sends an s-maxage cache header of 24 hours, any subsequent request for that page will be served by the PoP server for a period of 24 hours, and not the origin server.
Server Level
This type of full page caching is done by the web server or the origin server. For example, Apache uses Traffic Server, while Nginx uses fastcgi caching and proxy cache.
Application Level
There is no trickery here, its all done by WordPress caching engines and these are the most popular:
- WP Super Cache – the most popular caching engine with a few add-ons, like the integration of CDN.
- W3 Total Cache – another very popular one, with CDN integration and tends to be installed by default on many web hosts
- Batcache – a plugin that doesn’t get used as much as it should, this one does just what it says – caching. Nothing more, nothing less. There is no CDN integration, no preloading of cache, no tricks. Just pure and simple full page caching. There is a catch though; there is no file-based caching. Most plugins that offer caching generally create files that have got the cached page version in them so that when the request is made, the file is served. Batcache will create an entire full page cache and store it in WP Object Cache.
These are the best solutions available for full page caching on your WordPress website. It really doesn’t matter which one you choose, it will have the result of speeding up your page loading times and server response time.
If you choose one of the caching plugins, simply go to your WordPress dashboard and download it from there. None of them require any special configuration because they are simple plugins that do what they say on the box.
Full page caching is one of the first optimizations you should make for speeding up your website because it seriously affects the front-end experience.