In the current times, users expect the websites to load within the blink of an eye. According to Kissmetrics, 47% of users expect a site to load within 2 seconds and 40% of users abandon the website if it does not load within 3 seconds. If that’s not all, even Google takes page load speed into consideration before assigning a page rank to a website in the search engine results. So, a slow website has poor visibility and more dissatisfied customers and bounce rates. Website owners adopt many ways to improve the speed of their site like image optimization, reducing HTTP requests, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), optimally managing CSS and JavaScript, etc. However, if the web host does not offer high speeds, then all these efforts will not make a noticeable difference in the site speed. This brings us to the concept of Caching.

What is Website Caching?

In order to understand caching, let’s look at the request-response mechanism of a website. When a user requests any information from a website, the request is received by the web server. It first decodes the request, collects the data, converts the data into the required format, and starts transmitting it to the user’s browser. Since this is done for every single page visit, an increase in the number of visitors can result in a slow-loading website.

Caching is a way of creating stored versions of web pages. Therefore, when a user requests any information, the request is sent to the caching server. This server checks its cache to see if the information is available with it. If yes, then it transmits the required data to the user without going through the web server.