Super Caching

Purpose and Best Practices

Caching parts of your website means storing (copies of) them for faster retrieval. Therefore, you will want to cache entire webpages because it takes a while to assemble them. Serving a copy of them stored in your cache system is much quicker to load and improves your website visitors’ experience.

Do we need to cache the whole website? If not, what exactly do we need to cache then?

Best practice is to use caching for:

• your home page and most visited webpages, in full – if none are time-sensitive
• the important database results made by your site visitors’ frequent queries 
• any data that is expensive or that is taking time to generate or retrieve 

Table of Contents

• Static cache
• Dynamic cache
• Memcached
• Caching In

Caching Types

Static Cache

Siteground NGINX Direct Delivery caches all the static content of your website including your Images, CSS files, JavaScript files, and plain HTML documents. Thus, your visitors load such content from the cache instead of the server directly. This service optimizes content delivery, speeds up slow sites, and increases the number of hits a site can handle.

The NGINX Direct Delivery cache is automatically flushed every three hours, so that if there are changes made during this time they become available to your visitors.

Dynamic Cache

Without caching, the following is needed to load your page: a hit on your page is served by the PHP service which processes all the WordPress files, theme, and plugin codes, which makes a number of queries to the MySQL database server, and then produces the final output (loading the page). This process requires time to get all the data and to process it.

The dynamic cache stores the final result of all this work and serves it to the next client directly. This greatly reduces the TTFB (time to first byte) of your site and can reduce the loading time of your pages more than ten times!

The default time we keep a standard page of your site in this cache is twelve hours.

Memcached

This service speeds up database calls, API calls, and page rendering by storing data and objects in the server’s RAM to reduce the number of times a database is queried.

The memcached object caching mechanism stores frequently executed queries to your database(s) and then reuses them for better performance.

Caching In

Listen to Cal Evans, PHP programmer, to learn more about what data we need to store and where, how caching works, and how to prevent the problem from cached stale data and to serve fresh data.

More Information

• Find out more about super caching on SG knowledge base.
• Read our blog about how to clear all websites caches (and when).
• See the results you can get with our three layers of caching.