Caching is one of technologies which can contribute to site speed. Besides, caching will enable your stored data to be available for future requests. Some web developers might be familiar with it, some might not. But, if you haven’t been familiar with caching, you can learn more about it in this article. This article will explain what WordPress cache is and how it can be implemented on many different levels.
What is Caching?
In computing, the word “cache” is quite familiar. It refers to software or hardware component which is temporarily used to store values and retrieve them faster in the future. Values include MySQL queries, or compiled PHP bytecode as well as duplicate data, such as HTML and images.
In fact, we can gain a significant performance advantage by making copies of data and placing them in the “caching” component. This is because your visitors can retrieve cached content much faster than un-cached. Besides, your performance improvement can enhance depends on how much data that you can cache.
Things that can be cached
There are several levels, depending on how far you want to go in optimizing your website using caching. Here they are:
- HTML Output
You can find many plugins that can help you cache the HTML page itself. For instance, you can use WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache that can perform cache and many more. These plugins cache the result of the HTML output saving time for future requests. In fact, you can serve uncached content for every plugin have a cache invalidation mechanism.
You can also try to “minify” HTML to make it smaller. This will add up a couple of kilobytes per page and keep increasing over time.
- PHP OpCache
A technique which PHP takes the source PHP files and compiles them into an intermediary form called bytecode is named OpCaching. Bytecode is like a computer’s machine code, but it refers to machine code that is executed by a “virtual machine” rather than by a real one. Fortunately, it can be executed quicker than having the PHP interpreter parse a command at a time since it is machine code and resides in memory.
At a certain level, caching stores these bytecode data into memory, this causes your application gets executed faster. Besides, in order to have PHP OpCache enabled, you need to have access to the PHP configuration file. - PHP Object Cache
This cache is done on the language’s OOP level. It uses the concept of “objects” to describe logic, data, and ideas. Objects are constantly being created and destroyed as your application runs. This technique solves the problem by caching the objects themselves.
You can find PHP object cache in Memcached and the assorted ones for Redis. However, in order to enable PHP Object caching, you need to have access PHP configuration. - MySQL Query Caching
The idea might be the same with PHP object cache, unless it is applied at a database level. A set of data are returned by the database based on the query that was entered. In fact, someone can get data much faster if someone has called the same data first. This is because they would reside cached in memory. But, you need to have access to the database server.