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Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

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Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

Read time 10 min read
Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

Test your SEO in 60 seconds! Diib is one of the best SEO tools in the world. Diib uses the power of big data to help you quickly and easily increase your traffic and rankings. We’ll even let you know if you already deserve to rank higher for certain keywords.

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What is Website Caching?

One of the most advantageous technologies currently available is website caching. Once you have cached web pages, your site will be significantly faster. This means your SEO scores will improve along with your user satisfaction. You will also see much better conversions leading to an increased profit if you are selling your services or products online. The specific details and technology required for caching are extremely complicated. Despite this, the idea is actually very simple. 

A good example is if you were asked to find a solution for two plus two. You automatically know the answer is four. You did not need to perform any calculations to determine the answer because you have used addition so often during your life. You remember the answer with no mental processing necessary. This concept is similar to the way the process of caching works. Every month websites are usually viewed anywhere from a few hundred times to millions. 

Under normal circumstances, when a web page is requested by your browser the server must make a lot of time-consuming and complex calculations. The most recent posts need to be retrieved, the sidebar widgets for the site located, the footer and header generated, etc. The results for a lot of these calculations will be identical. The reason caching is so important is because it enables your server to remember the results as opposed to separately processing every individual request. 

Every time you open a website, pieces of the pages are taken by your browser then stored on the hard drive of your computer. A few of the assets most frequently stored by your browser include:

  • JavaScript
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • Images
  • Pictures
  • Logos
  • Backgrounds

Your browser generally caches what are referred to as static assets. These are parts of the site that remain the same between visits. Each individual website determines how long the assets are cached and which ones. Certain assets will be removed from your hard drive within a couple of days while others can stay in your cache for as long as a year. 

Some people become somewhat nervous when learning assets from numerous websites are stored on their hard drives without either their permission or knowledge. This is because a lot of trust is placed in web developers. Developers do not generally place anything malicious or destructive on your computer. Despite the fairly rare exceptions, browser caching offers you more benefits than risks. You can ensure your computer remains safe by using common sense, virus protection and good firewalls. 

Are Cached Web Pages More Effective?

Yes, caching makes your website much more effective. Once your website is coded properly, it can load in as few as two seconds. You can check the speed of your site using a wide variety of tools available online. There are also free services and tools available. If your speed is slow, the solution is caching your website. There are two basic types of caching, server and browser. You can significantly decrease your load time to ensure your website loads much quicker. 

If your site is too slow, you will lose users. Most consumers will not wait for your website to finish loading. They will leave and their business will go to one of your competitors. Another important consideration is in addition to making your site faster, you are also improving the overall performance. When you receive an unexpected spike in traffic, your website will be able to perform much more efficiently. A recent study was conducted regarding caching. The results showed caching increased speed a maximum of 300 percent. Here is an example of faster load times after caching a web page:

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: SearchVIU)

Check Cache of Website

The simplest way to understand the process of caching is by looking at the process necessary for serving pages. A good example is if you have a blog and have enabled caching. The first time a new visitor views your page it is received in the traditional manner. Your site receives the request, it is processed through the server, the page is changed to an HTML file and then sent to the web browser of your visitor. 

When you turn on your cache online, the HTML file is stored by your server. This is usually in the RAM or random access memory due to the fast speed. The next time your page is viewed by a visitor or yourself, no processing or HTML conversion is necessary. The HTML file is already prepared, so it can be sent directly to the browser. You can check your internet website cache by entering CMD in your Window’s search box then clicking on Command Prompt. For instance:

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: GreenGeeks)

When you reach the Command Prompt window, enter WMIC Memcache list briefly and hit enter. You will then see the status and size of the cache memory on your computer screen. 

Is My Web Cache Affected if I Change My Content?

One of the biggest concerns is what happens if the content is changed after turning on caching. Many people believe new posts will not be visible because they will not be a part of the web cache. As long as your caching system has been set up correctly, there is no reason to be concerned. When certain conditions are met including changing or adding to your content, your cache is emptied then regenerated to ensure all new information can be viewed by your visitors. 

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A good example is if you have configured your cache for a WordPress site. When you publish a new post, your homepage cached version and archive pages will be deleted. All of your other posts and pages are not affected because you have not made any changes. 

Types of Caching

There are two basic types of caches. Browser caching is performed on the user side. Server caching takes place directly through the server. When you open a website, you need to retrieve a lot more than just page content such as fonts, stylesheets and JavaScript files. All of this is downloaded by your browser along with the actual page content. When browser caching is enabled, your browser has the ability to store these files for a certain period of time. 

This means you do not need to retrieve files every time you open the website. During your first visit, a lot of resources are immediately cached by your browser. A few seconds are generally necessary to complete the download. The next time you open the site, you will see the load time has significantly decreased. This is often by a minimum of one second. The mechanism necessary for server caching is different. Request results are stored as opposed to processing each individual request. The image below shows the amount of resources being downloaded to your browser when you first log onto wikipedia. It may seem like a lot but because of browser caching the next time you log on it will be significantly decreased because it was saved to your browser.

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: Code by Amir)

You are served the saved results to ensure everything happens a lot faster. You might already be familiar with the terms full page cache and object cache. These are both methods for server caching. The full page cache is described above. An object cache is different because only data pieces and bits are stored instead of complete pages. This type of caching is often helpful for code or when complex operations are stored including generating your navigational menu. 

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WordPress Site Cache

If you are caching in WordPress, you need to understand three important pieces of information, how to use machine plugins, how to write efficient code and how to use the built-in cache of your host. 

How to Use WordPress Caching Plugins

The most critical piece of information you can have is never under any circumstance use more than one plugin for caching. Not only will this fail to increase the speed of your website, but there is a good chance your speed will actually decrease. This can cause your site to break and go offline. Make certain you only use one caching plugin. If you configure everything correctly, the speed of your website will significantly increase. There are a lot of good caching plugins currently available. 

Writing Efficient Code

If you are a coder, you should have a basic understanding of the internal workings of WordPress. A good example is when you need to get metadata for one of your posts. All of the data you need is retrieved by WordPress. This ensures if you receive data from a large number of different posts, nothing is wasted. The second most important concept is understanding how to use WordPress transients correctly. 

Transients are a type of solution for object caching but there is an expiration date. Transients are useful for caching headers and footers because under normal circumstances no changes are necessary. If you do need to make a change, you can just empty your cache. 

Using Caching from Your Host

If you are running your website through a managed hosting environment from WordPress, this is highly applicable. You can use numerous good caching services and mechanisms such as Kinsta, Flywheel and WPEngine. These hosting companies offer caching systems at a significantly lower level than what is available with WordPress plugins. This means they are a lot more effective. These systems have been specifically tuned to ensure they perform well with your WordPress hosting environment. If you are using Kinsta this is where you need to go to enable caching:

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: Kinsta)

Using this type of caching system increases its utility even more. If you are using WordPress to host your site, you should probably not be using any caching plugins. This is because WordPress will disallow using specific plugins for caching because there is a good chance you will be interfering with the caching systems already implemented by WordPress. 

What is a CDN Cache?

A content delivery network is usually called a CDN. This is used to cache your content including webpages, videos and images in proxy servers. The locations of the servers are closer to the end-users than the origin servers. A proxy server receives your request then passes it to the other servers. Your content is delivered faster because the CDN is closer to the person initiating the request. A good comparison to a CDN is a grocery store chain. 

Shoppers do not travel the distance to the farms growing the food because this can be several hundred miles away. Shoppers travel a much shorter distance to a local grocery store. Since the food originates from farms with various locations and distances, local grocers allow consumers to shop within minutes as opposed to spending days traveling. Content is also stocked by CDN caches for the web to ensure your webpages load significantly faster. 

When you use a CDN to request content from a site, the content is gathered by the CDN through an origin server. A copy of your content is saved in case you make another request in the future. As long as you keep requesting content it will stay in the CDN cache. 

What Does a Cache Online Do?

Every time your computer loads a webpage, a lot of information must be downloaded by your browser before you can view the webpage. The majority of the webpage content is cached by your browser on your computer hard drive. The next time the webpage is loaded, most of the content has been locally stored. This means the page will load much faster. This is the purpose of an online cache. The files will be stored by your browser until the TTL or time to live has expired or the cache for your hard drive is full. 

TTL is a determining factor for the length of time content is cached. If you prefer, you can always clear your browser cache. Once you have done so, every website you visit will load the same way it did the first time you visited the site. If your cache originally loaded something incorrectly, clearing your cache will help everything load correctly. Keep in mind if you clear your browser cache, your page load times will be temporarily slower. The image below shows a few options for TTL:

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: StackPath Help)

Benefits of Internet Website Cache

There are numerous benefits to caching including improving the experience of your visitors. The experience of your users impacts your brand directly. Your online business can improve or be irreparably damaged. There are several different aspects contributing to a satisfactory visitor experience. One of your most important considerations when optimizing the performance of your website is caching due to the three key benefits detailed below. 

Content Availability

One of the most important components of your user’s experience is content availability. Your website can be accessed by consumers from all over the world. There are several reasons your users may be unable to get your website to load. Your website might be having intermittent outages or frequent interruptions because of your network. For either of these circumstances, your users can still access your website if your content has been cached. 

Reducing Latency

Your users will most likely become frustrated if your pages require a long time to load. The result is generally a higher bounce rate including the following stats. 

  • A load time delay of just two seconds during a transaction increases your abandonment rates by as much as 87 percent.
  • Approximately half of all online shoppers in the United States abandon a purchase due to slow loading websites. 

Site Cache: What It Is and How to See Yours

(Image Credit: Section.io)

The speed your web pages load at is critical to make certain your users have a good experience. You can decrease your load time by caching because your visitors will be served by the closest location to their vicinity including a nearby server or their hard disc. Caching your pages allows them to load 50 percent faster. Since the desired content is retrieved significantly faster, latency is effectively decreased. The time necessary to retrieve the data from your cache is less than from the original server. 

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Avoiding Network Congestion

The web manages heavy traffic and handles massive amounts of data throughout the day. This means major networks often have issues with heavy bandwidth congestion. A good example is your favorite local restaurant. If the restaurant only has one location, there will be new customers arriving every few minutes. This means the restaurant will remain crowded. If the restaurant uses all its resources in an attempt to manage so many customers, the result is a long line.

This is because the restaurant has exceeded its capacity resulting in service delays. If the restaurant had several different locations in the area, customers could be better distributed to balance the excess load. This type of logic is just as applicable to the internet. The difference is caching is used to decrease congestion as opposed to more locations. When your content is cached, the path the data travels is a lot shorter. 

Not every request is directed in the same way. This means the network is freed up and can decrease the load placed on the origin server. The result is non-cached content can be served much faster. 

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FAQ’s

Web cache is temporary storage that is used to hold web documents, images, and other multimedia on web pages to minimize the lag on the server. When referring to a web cache system you may mean an appliance or a computer program.

To find Chrome’s cache you need to navigate through this file pathway “\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache.” The folder you are looking for is the very last one titled Cache.

Even when your headers say the images will not be cached your browser will do so anyway. The issue of the necessary cache-control headers can be fixed.

Clearing your cache can help you in multiple ways. First, it can help your website and/or application run faster and smoother. Next, it protects all of your personal information from getting stolen or seen. Finally, it prevents you from using older versions or forms of the website and/or application.

You should clear your browser cache as often as monthly or bi monthly. Especially if you are trying to see website alterations in real time or you aren’t making any alterations at all.

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Daniel Urmann

Author Bio:

Daniel Urmann is the co-founder of Diib.com. Over the past 17 years Daniel has helped thousands of business grow online through SEO, social media, and paid advertising. Today, Diib helps over 150,000 business globally grow online with their SaaS offerings. Daniel’s interest include SMB analytics, big data, predictive analytics, enterprise and SMB search engine optimization (SEO), CRO optimization, social media advertising, A/B testing, programatic and geo-targeting, PPC, and e-commerce. He holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) focused in Finance and E-commerce from Cornell University – S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management.

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