I use a caching plugin for similar reasons to @Devrealm_Guy, albeit that I use Memcached instead of Redis.
Most of my sites are membership sites or intranets where page caching actually harms performance rather than helping it, but using object caching significantly reduces the load on the server and allows for large numbers of people to be logged in and active on the site without impinging on performance.
Oh, and by the way, I use Litespeed Cache. It works well without a Litespeed server, but is obviously designed to work best in conjunction with one. (If you’re currently on Apache, you would see a performance boost by switching to Litespeed, and I’m told that it’s a fairly painless transition.)
You should optimize your website & hosting without any caching and CDN turned on. Using Cloudfare? Pause website!
One more time: you should do everything possible your website loads as fast as it can. For most websites, it is about 1 - 1.5 sec. Check TTFB to evaluate your hosting.
If your website have huge traffic, which your hosting can’t handle, use caching. Until 1000 pageviews/day don’t bother with it.
Caching is not without drawbacks, it brings its own problems. If you can live without - go ahead. If you want to hide poor performance of hosting or your website - please, don’t do it, it’s a cancer treatment by doing face makeup. Not effective.
If your website have huge traffic from different locations - you can start to consider CDN.
Resume: your site should be fast, use caching for huge traffic handling and CDN for huge traffic from different worldwide locations. Crappy shared hosting and old PHP should be fixed by changing hosting, not by mocking problems with cache plugin.
Regarding your website: timing is more or less acceptable, but I see, that you host on a busy shared server. OK, I promise to sponsor you a managed VPS with some elitist stack to host your website and compare with. After 2-3 months it will be available (I hope), I will contact you.
I’m not on a shared server…it’s a VPS running PHP 7.2.
At this point, there’s only a couple hundred pageviews a day. The site and hosting are highly optimized and I use Autoptimize to lessen requests/bandwidth. At this point, it’s faster than most *Press sites… just wondering when (if ever) I’ll need to look at actual caching.
A VPS? Then I didn’t like the first waterfall line of your report. To my taste, the first response should be faster.
Until your server can handle it without speed penalty - it is OK not to use cache. 1000 pageviews per day, even if your server can handle it, you can start considering.
Couple of hundred a day? Dont worry about caching, seriously people selling cache plugins will tell you you need to buy a cache plugin. When I first started with WP many many years ago the 1st plugin people would install is AIOSEO … now days the 1st plugin they install is a cache plugin with 20 million options all designed to chase the magic 100% unicorn score.
I have one of our servers doing 30 requests per second, do the maths its 2.5 million hits per day, no cache.
Edit: and yes its a $20 VPS.
Mine’s also a $20/VPS…and I’m already getting the magic unicorn score. Ok, points taken… I’ll revisit caching if I ever manage to get over 1000 pageviews a day.
Edit: I’ve moved some posts to this thread to avoid hijacking the other thread.
Hi,
Thanx for splitting this thread. The reason I brought up a caching plugin had nothing to do with speed or performance of ClassicPress - in fact its much faster.
To clarify. The easiest way to hook a CDN (Content Delivery Network) into a WordPress (and now ClassicPress) website is via a caching plugin. So that was my reason for asking about it. I should have been more clear on that.
As @Aussie points out, most people should take advantage of a caching plugin - different topic. But some clients with heavy use sites (via traffic or types of plugins) do need caching.
Thanx everyone for leaving your replies - I have 2 or 3 plugins to consider specifically for ClassicPress.
I’ve never found a need for a caching plugin. I tested a while back and it made no difference to me (but the sites I manage don’t get thousands of hits per day either).
As others have said… keep the site optimised and light, and have good hosting. Most of my sites are <1 second page load.
I only use a cache plugin if necessary and sometimes I do find it is necessary. I run my own VPS so I know that is as optimised as it can be. But some sites with hefty plugins struggle without some help. I also find caching can make a big difference on image-heavy sites too (sites with large photo galleries for instance) even if the images are as squished as they possibly can be. Sometimes I do use lazy loading but I don’t always like the effect that has.
Actually that’s a good point. I do manage one site for a photographer and not sure if I have ever tested a caching plugin on that one. I’ll try it and see if it has an effect.
Have you tried Chrome’s new lazy loading feature? I never did lazy loading before for images because I found that it provided a horrible user experience, but Chrome does it well.
For the “average” user creating a website, who knows little or nothing about optimising images, editing .htaccess etc.; my thought would be that a “plugin” really is needed.
I think that’s probably true Mark. The average user could probably make significant improvements by installing a plugin. The danger of course if that an average user may also not have the knowledge to configure the plugin properly in which case it could make things worse. That’s one thing I like about WP Fastest Cache. I think it is one of the easiest cache plugins to configure.
I would say multiple thousands of requests per hour is a better time to start looking at page caching than 1000 requests per day, but this depends on the speed and quality of your hosting and your site.
I have to agree with this, even though sometimes we can’t do the many-hour overhaul of an existing website so it just gets a caching plugin!
To summarize, if you’re happy with your site’s speed, you probably don’t need a page cache. If you’re getting huge amounts of traffic, and even adding object caching isn’t enough to get performance to where you want it, then you might want to consider it.
