Page load speed is not only a major factor in how many people find and stay on your site, it’s also a factor in how much revenue you can earn. In Greg Linden’s short (but famous) article, he writes about internal tests at Amazon that showed mere milliseconds of delay in page load time cost the company substantial revenue.
Even Google experienced similar results, citing 20% less traffic to a page when it loads just a half second slower.
Page caching is really good…
Most busy WordPress websites make use of some page caching plugin to ease processing load off servers and please site visitors with faster page loads. These WordPress caching plugins cache entire pages for serving up quickly.
…except when it isn’t
Sometimes, however, cached pages cannot be used. This is common for:
Membership sites, where user-specific content would make cached pages incorrect for most users.
Sites with rapidly updated page content, where cached pages would not keep up with visitors’ expectations.
Sites presenting unique content based on visitors’ location, browser, and other personal variables.
Partial page caching to the rescue
Today I’m celebrating 1,000 posts I’ve written on WPMU.org on WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress. I’ve really enjoyed meeting the challenge of daily blogging and thought it a great time to review some of my favorite posts from the past two years.
Greetings, WPMU readers! I come bearing a witch’s brew of news both bad and good. (Sorry…that’s just how I roll.)
The bad news: if you run WordPress, then sooner or later, you’ll have to understand caching. Caching is critical to site performance. And performance, as Siobhan noted, is critical to the success of your Web sites: if they bog down, both your direct traffic and your search engine rankings will suffer. But here’s the good news: caching’s not that bad! Caching only seems confusing because there are so many options available.
If you’re a fan of the popular W3 Total Cache plugin, then you probably find yourself clicking that “Empty All Caches” button quite a bit when making updates to your WordPress site.
Admin Flush W3TC Cache is a new, simple plugin that adds an “Empty All Caches” button to every page in the WordPress admin.
Global Translator automatically translates your blog into 48 different languages and is one of the fastest ways to start engaging thousands of new visitors. This plugin can help increase global awareness of your WordPress blog or BuddyPress social network, as well as allow non-English speakers to understand your content, leave comments, and interact.
