Caching.

One of the most important priorities for a website builder is to ensure a website functions quickly. This all starts, of course, with optimizing the loading speed when a user first opens such a website. After all, customers don’t like having to wait a long time, and optimizing load time is an important part of SEO.

What is caching?

To significantly reduce this loading time, you could use caching. What does caching entail? Caching is a technique that allows you to temporarily store data and files in a digital storage location, or cache. This allows a user’s computer to open your website faster by retrieving all site data from that cache.

As you read this article, you’ll come to understand how caching works. We’ll also explain the different types of caching and the two technologies most commonly used for this purpose. Of course, we’ll cover the benefits of caching, as well as its potential drawbacks and pitfalls.

This is what happens when you connect

Before we delve a little deeper into the technology behind caching, it’s helpful to understand exactly what happens when you open a website. After you click on a website or type the site’s URL into the address bar, your computer attempts to connect to the computer where that site is hosted. That computer functions as a web server.

That web server contains all the files and data needed to display a website correctly on your screen. In total, this easily amounts to thousands of small files. The web server must assemble all these files like a puzzle.

You might think that takes quite a bit of time. In practice, it’s actually not that bad: usually, this only takes a few seconds. Especially since the rise of mobile users—with slower internet speeds—this is no longer fast enough. That’s why people have gradually started thinking of ways to reduce the total load time. The cache mentioned earlier turned out to be a good solution. The cache contains the necessary files ready to go, so that puzzle no longer needs to be put together.

3 benefits of caching

Here are three reasons why you should implement caching for your website:

1. We cannot emphasize this enough: a long loading time is simply no longer acceptable to many consumers. Experts estimate that approximately 40% of internet users will close a website that takes more than three seconds to load without hesitation. The key is to keep the loading time as short as possible, preferably even one second or less.
2. It is well known that for online search engines like Google, loading speed is a major ranking factor. So the faster your website loads, the higher your site will appear in SEO search results, which helps you rank higher on Google.
3. Finally, we can confidently state that a fast loading speed leads to higher conversion rates. After all, far fewer people will quickly close a fast-loading website. As a bonus, it ranks higher in search results, meaning more consumers will click on it.

What types of caching are there?

There are various forms of caching. The following two types are the most relevant:

• Server caching: this is the type of caching that a website builder deals with. You can think of the server cache as the cache where website files are stored (as described above), so that they can be displayed to the website visitor as quickly as possible.
• Browser caching: this type of caching is likely more familiar to the average consumer. The browser cache contains all the files your computer has already had to use or download to open websites. All these files are therefore temporarily stored in a browser cache. If you open a website a second time, your browser cache should allow it to load extra quickly.

The two most important caching technologies

To add caching functionalities to your website, you can use various technologies. Two of these are the most well-known, namely:

• Redis Cache: Redis ensures extra-fast loading web pages by storing data and files in RAM. Redis is considered a suitable technology for effectively managing the caching of complex websites.
• Varnish Cache: as a website visitor, this essentially directs you to Varnish’s server. This server already contains the assembled puzzle we mentioned earlier in this article. It can therefore cache entire pages. The load time with this technology is extremely short—up to a thousand times faster than if you weren’t using caching at all. Varnish also requires less specific technical expertise from the website developer.

Clearing the cache

As a consumer, you probably already know what it means to clear your computer’s cache. This involves deleting all temporarily stored files from websites you’ve visited. It’s helpful to do this on a regular basis. Your computer runs faster overall when the (temporary) storage memory isn’t too full.

For website builders, there are also several other ways to clear a cache. After all, you can also clear a website’s cache. This removes stored (parts of) websites from the cache. This is typically done when a specific (sub)page has been updated with new information. Naturally, you want this information to be included in the cache so that a website user can actually see this new information (and see it quickly).

Potential disadvantages of caching

Despite all the benefits that caching offers, there are also some potential drawbacks and pitfalls you should be aware of, namely:

• When you add new content to a specific page on your website, you should ideally recache that page. This involves extra work and a certain risk of errors. You can work around this drawback by opting for an automatically refreshing cache.
• If you run a small website with a limited number of subpages, there’s a good chance you’re implementing a cache that’s actually unnecessarily powerful. With such a site, you don’t need a cache with a large capacity. An automatically refreshing cache is also generally unnecessary in this case. You may therefore end up with a cache that has excess capacity, which is somewhat of a waste of the money invested.
• If you don’t implement caching properly, you run the risk of slowing down your website or even failing to load certain elements correctly. For users, a non-functional website is naturally more frustrating than a slower one: so make sure you have this implemented correctly, for example by an internet agency.