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How Using a Cache Plugin Benefits Your Website

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The benefits of having a cache plugin and why you should be using one

If you’re not familiar with what a cache plugin plugin does, it’s all about your website’s speed. The speed in which pages on your website load is an important factor major Search Engines such as Google, Bing & Yahoo take into consideration when ranking your website. Numerous studies have consistently shown that an average %80 of visitors will try another website if your site’s pages do not load in under 5 seconds.

Caching is the process of creating an HTML copy of a page on your website which is stored on your webhost’s server which allows webpages to be display faster to your visitors.

Even without installing a cache plugin your webpages are still technically being cached but the cache isn’t being saved. If you install and configure a cache plugin then it allows visitors who have already visited a particular webpage once to avoid unnecessarily re-running any queries again which results in much faster page load times.

There are many ways to check and increase the speed of your website and many of the tools can actually determine for you if there are any issues with your current caching strategy. Every website can benefit from a properly configured cache plugin so it’s important that you’re using one. One of the most popular cache plugins is W3 Total Cache, here are some of it’s features and benefits:

  • W3 Total Cache can cache every webpage along with it’s content, JavaScript, CSS, search results, database objects, etc.
  • It can reduce what’s on your webpages to improve the speed. If a page or post contained extra CSS or comments, w3 Total Cache is capable of combining the CSS files into one request.
  • It fully supports the integration of Mobile, WP-CLI and CDN.

It’s important to note that you should only ever have one cache plugin installed at a time. If you’re currently using a cache plugin, you need to disable it before installing & activating W3 Total Cache. You should also ensure that you have a sufficient amount of memory to handle your cache because W3 Total Cache is very powerful. For the majority of websites this shouldn’t be an issue.

W3 Total Cache is so popular even Google engineer Matt Cutts uses the plugin for his blog.