Make WordPress Faster with a Caching Plugin

There are a number of things to consider when making WordPress faster, using a cache service or caching plugin is one of them.

WordPress is what you could call a content mamangement system (CMS). Simply put it allows to store information into a database and retrieve that information and display it in a web page.

With making WordPress faster to load the content there are a few things to consider and one being is how to simplify the back and forth to the database.

How to Make WordPress Faster

One way to increase the page load speed with WordPress is to optimise the process with the database by using a caching plugin. To understand how a caching plugin can be shown if we look at the steps it takes for WordPress to render the website for each person who is viewing the website.

In general this is how a WordPress site works without optimization and caching:

1. When a person looks at your website, the browser tells WordPress that someone wants to view the site.
2. With the use of PHP WordPress requests information from the database via MySQL. MySQL then communicates back to WordPress using PHP, with the requested data to build the website.
3. WordPress then uses PHP to combine the returned content/data from MySQL and with the PHP files of the WordPress theme to generate the HTML content and format the websites content in the browser.
4. The browser displays the final rendered HTML content as a web page.

When using caching for WordPress optimisation:

1. Now when a person visits your website, the browser tells WordPress it would like to display the content of the website.
2. Because the site is using a cache plugin, WordPress knows there is a cached copy and does not need to collect all the information from the database but can display some cached HTML content.
3. As you can see by caching content you reduce the back and forth from the database.

By optimising WordPress with a caching plugin it can speed up the delivery of content to people visiting the WordPress site, but it can also save server resources and bandwidth.

By using W3 Total Cache, a WordPress caching plugin can help with the overall speed of the website as well as reduce server load times by rendering static pages as opposed to delivering content from the database to render the website.