Online, speed is everything. Nobody likes waiting for pages to load, and if you don’t want to lose people, every millisecond counts. Which is where web caching comes in. It helps your site serve up pages sooner, protecting its performance, safeguarding its scalability and helping it handle more traffic. So how does web caching work, and what kind do you need?
What is web caching?
It’s a way of serving up web pages faster. Whenever someone visits your site, their browser asks your server for the data it needs to display on each page. Hopefully, that happens quickly. But spikes in site traffic or extra load on your server can slow things down, so pages take longer to appear. By copying and temporarily storing your website the first time it’s loaded, caching enables it to be remembered and served up faster, without the visitor’s browser making a new request to your server. The result? People see your pages sooner, and there’s far less pressure on your server.
Why is caching so important?
For every fraction of a second, your page loads are delayed, you’ll lose visitors. People don’t want to hang around and can be less likely to trust slow-loading sites. Worse, slower page speeds can affect your Google rankings, meaning fewer visitors actually find you in the first place. Improving your site’s performance, resilience and scalability can be done in other ways, but they’re often complex, long-winded and expensive. Caching is a quick, easy, inexpensive (or sometimes even free) way to make a big difference to people’s experience of your site, boosting searchability, sales and loyalty. It’s pretty much a no-brainer.
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Our website hosting platform is full of tools to make managing your client portfolio easier than ever.What kinds of caching are there?
There are three main types of caching: site caching, browser caching and server caching. So what’s the difference? Well, what it comes down to is where those copied pages are stored, and how much control that gives you overimproving your site speeds. Let’s take a closer look…
How do I set up web caching for my site?
At Nimbus, we love Varnish Cache, a super-speedy caching system designed to give Magento sites superpowers.
If you’ve got Magento 2.3 or 2.4, it can cache your static and dynamic content, taking most of the load off your servers. As a result, it can make your sites up to 1000x faster, as well as boosting your server performance. Which means a better shopping experience for your site visitors – driving conversion, sales and repeat visits.
Even better, you can get Varnish Cache fast and completely free if you’re on one of our Oxygen hosting packages or above.
You can take a closer look at Varnish Cache here and find out how to get set up, fast.
