Cache

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Can anyone explain what cache means, I don't understand what the speed settings are. What should I set for that? Thanks

 
whimsmedia replied on at Permalink Reply
whimsmedia
I'm going to try and provide a very simplified explanation here of how I see things.

Caching is a way of making websites load faster. It works by saving a version of a page to the cache.

Every time a page is requested from a server running a CMS, the CMS software needs to compute all sorts of variables in order to figure out what needs to go where on that page and what it's supposed to look like. By saving the results of those computations to the cache, next time the same page is requested the server won't have to go through the process of doing all those computations again and can instead serve the version of that page that it had put together previously.

This decreases the time needed for the server to respond and puts less load on the server's resources.

The downside of caching is that when it is enabled you might not see the most recent version of the site. For instance, you might be requesting to see the homepage and although you've swapped one image for another you'll still get the old image. To fix things, and see the most up-to-date version, you just need to clear the cache (there's a Clear Cache button in System & Settings on the Dashboard).

If you find yourself changing things frequently, like when you are designing a theme for your website, it becomes inefficient to go into System & Settings and hit Clear Cache every time you need to see an updated version of your site so it's probably best to disable caching (temporarily) altogether.

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So, if you are working on your theme or making big changes to your site set the Basic Cache to Off. When you're done remember to set it back to On.

If your site is mostly static (you only update it once in a while) you can set Full Page Caching to On as well and press Clear Cache when you do update it just to be safe.

Hope that helped!