Optimize Website Speed With Cache Warming

Updated on Aug 26, 2024

Quick Summary
  • Use Page Speed Plus for 1 click Cache Warming
  • Try Our Free Tool
  • API also available

The speed at which your website loads has a tangible impact on the revenue it generates. Cache warming gets your site in front of customers' eyes faster, improving their user experience and increasing the likelihood of them converting.

PageSpeed Plus has a Cache Warming Tool. To see it in action, click the button below and enter a URL. The resulting page will show you the difference in loading time before and after caching.

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Contents

Caching Explained

Caching means fetching information and storing it closer to where it is used. Such a location may be a CDN point of presence, the users device, a cache server or anywhere that would work well as a convenient and fast transfer location.

Caching occurs whenever someone accesses this information for the first time and all of the computation needed to render the page is performed once and stored so it can be skipped for future requests.

For example, when rendering this article you are currently reading, information needs to be pulled from our database. The database structure is not optimal so a few joins are needed and the data is merged with information from amazon S3. This requires 1-2 seconds. To avoid that being needed for every user, we do it once and then cache the data for subsequent page loads.

The issue with this is that if people access different data frequently, the server will move it off of the cache to make way for other items. If an item is not accessed for a long time, then the next time people try to grab it, the site will again be slow.

What is Cache Warming?

A cache warmer preemptively loads data into the cache instead of waiting for the first user to access it. Cache Warming essentially mimics the first user and gets the slow load out of the way so it's fast for future visitors.

This step has several benefits, such as maintaining high website performance. It can be very useful when a site has high traffic or several content updates that need to be transmitted frequently.

Cache Warming Benefits

Sites that use cache warmers load significantly faster, especially on first visits. Even sites with heavy use, such as Netflix, can often achieve cache hit rates of around 99%. Thus, they can assure their users of the fastest delivery of content, ensuring people get the most out of their service.

Benefits are greater for mobile users. Despite the presence of 5G in most cities, there are still dead spots within 5G areas or rural areas with slow 3G or 4G coverage. For those, Cache warming makes a huge difference to their first page load.

Other benefits of using a cache warmer include:

  • Reduced server load
  • Lower resource usage
  • Higher server stability during traffic spikes
  • Fewer redundant server requests
  • Improved UX due to higher site speeds

Sites like ReloadUX even agree that better website performance has a direct link to the retention of potential users. There is little likelihood they will want to return to a slow site later.

Implementing a Cache Warmer on Your Site

If you’ve already tried the cache warming tool demo and like what you saw, it’s time to start a trial for the full version. Just follow these simple steps:

  1. Sign up and log in to PageSpeedPlus
  2. From the dashboard, click into the site you wish to set up the cache warming for
  3. Click Edit Site in the top right corner and scroll to the Cache Warming section
  4. Select which warming method you wish to use:
Monitored URLs - specific high-value URLs to cache only. You then need to add these manually.
Full Site - will use your website's sitemap to warm the entire site.

  1. Choose how often you wish to warm the cache. This could be hourly, daily, or on-demand.

  2. Select where you want the cache warm to execute from. If your website is in the UK, then select UK as the cache warm region, etc.

As you can see above, this tool requires no coding knowledge. You can set it all up via the simple interface, making it very easy to use no matter your knowledge level.

Best Practices for Website Speed Enhancement

When you set up the tool, there are a few simple tips that will help you have the best experience possible.

  • Prioritize caching home pages, new content, and high traffic sections
  • Regularly warm the cache and update it after major content updates
  • Use the analytics you receive to learn if specific uncached pages need caching
  • Use our API to auto warm the cache after your website deployment script runs

These will boost the effectiveness of every step you take to improve the speed of your site.

Web Optimization Strategies When Using a Cache Warmer

When using our caching warming script, it helps to adopt a holistic attitude to improving your site. As such, try to get as many insights as possible about users' experience and commit to improving that over time.

Examples of other Page Speed Plus features you can use to improve the UX of your site include:

  • Full Site Scans - monitor your site's performance metrics over time. You can get automated reports on every page of the site site.
  • Web Vitals Monitoring - checks key stats related to your website, including LCP, INP and CLS along with testing Time To First Byte

Each of these issues could have a significant impact on how much a user feels comfortable on your site.

Unleash Your Website's Potential

It is critical that your site delivers its content as fast as possible to ensure a superior user experience and reduce bounce. PageSpeedPlus Cache Warming is a simple yet powerful tool that can help you optimize your site for speed and performance.

Our tool can offer instant improvements with 1 click and improved user engagement, making you more likely to hook users. Scan your site today to start the monitoring process and learn what PageSpeedPlus can do for you.

Try Cache Warming Tool

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