Have you heard from friends and acquaintances that you should definitely clear your cache? It doesn't matter if you have your own website or are just a fan of surfing the Internet, it is imperative that you are familiar with the cache and how it works.
What is caching a website?
Website caching has emerged as one of the most effective technologies. It helps a web page run quickly, but it can also cause problems when it doesn’t load properly. In other words, with the help of caching, websites become extremely fast. This, of course, leads to significantly better SEO results and increased user satisfaction. In addition, you can ensure better development and therefore a stable income if you are engaged in online commerce. It can also prevent you from editing a website on the go. Whatever the situation, you will most likely need to know what the cache is at any given time and how to clear it.
While the technology and details of the caching process itself may seem complicated, the basic idea is quite simple. Websites are accessed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Typically, every time a browser requests a particular web page, the server has to perform complex and time-consuming calculations. It fetches the latest posts, generates part time data the header and footer, and finds the sidebar widgets on your site. However, in a large number of cases, the end result of these calculations will be the same. Wouldn’t it be great if we could just make the server remember the final result instead of processing each request individually? Caching does exactly that!
A well-coded website can load in seconds. Isn’t that fast enough? Is caching really worth a try? The answer is a resounding yes! When you use both browser and server-side caching, you can still reduce load times a lot, and when it comes to loading speed – it’s definitely worth it!
You should also know that by implementing caching, you are not only making your website noticeably faster, but you are also equipping and preparing it to bear the brunt of traffic spikes more effectively. Every time a user loads a web page, their browser has to download a lot of data to display that web page. To reduce page load time, browsers cache most of the content that is displayed on the web page, saving a copy of the web page content on the device's hard drive. This way, the next time the user loads the page, most of the content is already stored locally and the page will load much faster.
Browsers store these files until their time to live (TTL) expires or until the hard drive cache is full. (TTL is an indication of how long the content should be cached for). Users can also clear their browser cache if they wish.
What are the advantages of caching?
When you first visit a website, your browser has a conversation with the remote server that hosts the site. Your browser sends a request, and the server sends back one of the website's assets. The HTML page is the first to be downloaded, and it becomes the blueprint that the site is built on. As your browser reads the HTML code, it sends more requests to the server to send more parts of the page, mostly the static assets mentioned above.
Some web pages take a long time to download completely and become functional because they have many parts or their assets are large.