WordPress Hosting speed boost

Over the last few weeks you might have noticed that your WordPress Hosting account has become a bit speedier, particularly in the admin area. As ever, we’re always tinkering away behind the scenes in an effort to make the platform better; and most recently we’ve made some subtle adjustments and improvements to the caching we employ.

For the uninitiated – and at its most simple level – caching takes a copy of your page when it is first requested by a website visitor. When the same page is requested a second time by a new visitor, the server replies with the cached copy that it made for the first visit. As this doesn’t required any complex processing or database tasks, just the handing off of a simple pre-made page – the response times are fast with a capital whoosh. That’s a technical term, by the way.

In actuality the setup of caching we use is much more nuanced and we work at various stages to cache different elements of your site for faster response times – from attempting the above caching of a complete page load via Nginx, through small microcaching such as PHP-FPM Opcache, Object Caching and database caching. We take care of this all behind the scenes, it’s something you don’t need to worry about or remember. It’s also why we don’t allow caching plugins on our platform, we have quite a complex setup already in place that’s capable of powering 100s if not 1000s of page views per second on a base plan.

Our most recent update is the enabling of PHP-Opcache on all containers across our platform, plus some very light database caching via Mariadb; in addition we have made some specific optimisations for InnoDB which has seen a massive improvement in performance for queries against the wp_options  table in particular.

For most sites, caching errors will never be an issue: we work hard to make the experience as seamless as possible. For larger or very complex setups though, if you do see any issues, please get in touch.