Speed is one of the most important features of web hosting, alongside security and reliability. Slow websites have no place on the internet today, as web users demand information instantly. However, the speed at which websites load does not depend solely on the quality of the hosting or servers. A lot also depends on the optimisation of the website itself, where page caching plays an important role.

If you read our blog regularly, you will have come across this term many times. You may not have had any problems understanding the process behind page caching, but it is much more likely that you have just read this section briefly and not gone into the details.

In today’s article, we won’t go into the details, but we’ll give you a clear and easy-to-understand overview of how caching works. To help you understand what page caching means, it’s easiest to illustrate with an example of a WordPress website. The same applies to other systems.

Next, we’ll introduce you to server-level page caching, made possible by LiteSpeed technology, which powers our lightning-fast RESELLER and TURBO hosting packages.

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• What does page caching mean?
  • What happens when the content of a web page changes?
• Caching at server level
  • What about when there is a change on the page?

What does page caching mean?

So let’s go back to WordPress, which you’re probably already quite familiar with. Do you still remember how fast your website was right after you installed it? You don’t, because initially you just used a basic, very simple graphic template, you didn’t have any plugins installed, and you didn’t have pages, posts or images.

But things started to get “complicated” when you installed a more complex graphic template and a larger number of plug-ins. It’s true that at this point your site looked much better and had more functionality, but all the extras made it run a bit slower.

Why does a website with a complex graphic template and a large number of plug-ins load slower?

When someone visits your website, the PHP code of the graphic template and all the active plugins is processed in the background to display it. Of course, it takes time to display the page (in HTML format) to the visitor. And if the graphic template or any of the plug-ins are poorly programmed, this has the additional effect of slowing down the responsiveness of the website.

By using caching, this problem can be largely avoided. The job of caching is to prevent the processing of the same PHP code triggered by each visitor’s visit. Instead, it is processed only once – when the first visitor visits the site.

The result of the PHP code for each page is then stored in HTML format, which is served to all subsequent visitors. So instead of dynamically generating a page display from many PHP files, visitors are presented with a static page, which greatly reduces the page load time.

But what about when the content of the web page changes?

When you update the content on your website, for example by adding a new article, correcting your contact details or changing the price of a product, you definitely want the new version of the content to be shown to your visitors. You should therefore remove the existing, now outdated version of the page from the cache.

Fortunately, there are many plugins for WordPress (and other CMS systems) that automatically take care of effective caching. They generate static pages from dynamic PHP queries, which are immediately replaced with new ones when any changes are made. Therefore, when the first visitor visits the website after a certain change, a new HTML page is generated again and cached.

Caching the page at server level

If you haven’t done much research into the concept of how page caching works, we trust that after reading this, you’ve got the basics. You may even already use one of the WordPress plugins listed, but you’ve never delved into the details. What else you need to know is that all of the aforementioned plugins are caching at the application (WordPress) level.

What does this mean? In most cases, when someone visits a website with the caching plugin installed, PHP code still needs to be executed. This is because the PHP code within the caching plugin is executed to ensure that the HTML version of the cached page is displayed to the visitor. This also requires that the PHP code of the WordPress core itself is executed beforehand.

By using server-level page caching, which is made possible by LiteSpeed Web Server in combination with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, you avoid the processing of PHP code altogether. If a cached version of the page exists on the server, it is served directly to the visitor without any querying of the WordPress system or PHP code processing.

But what about when there is a change to the page?

The way server-level caching works is very similar to the way application-level caching works. In this case, it is also necessary to delete the outdated HTML version from the cache and replace it with the new one. This is done using a special LiteSpeed Cache plugin, which illustrates the connection between WordPress and the caching settings on the LiteSpeed server.

LiteSpeed Cache, the server-level caching management plugin, is easily installed via the WordPress administration (or cPanel control panel). Once activated, caching will already be enabled, and the developers have also provided (for most websites) optimal default settings. It is therefore a very simple but extremely effective plug & play solution.

If you have a RESELLER or TURBO hosting package with us, on which you have a WordPress website or a WooCommerce webshop, we definitely recommend you to take advantage of the LiteSpeed server capacity. The same applies to other popular platforms, for which we have prepared detailed instructions on how to install the plugin and speed up your website in just a few steps.

• LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress
• LiteSpeed Cache for Joomla! CMS
• LiteSpeed Cache for PrestaShop
• LiteSpeed Cache for OpenCart