Add Caching to Site

Hi all, my site doen’t seem to be caching at all - if I click from the list page onto a product page and then go back, the list page is reloaded all over again - I’m guessing this probably isn’t a good practice…what would be the best thing to do? Any help, advice or pointers are appreciated as always :slight_smile:

I’m not a caching expert… in fact dont believe it to be beneficial for any but the most heavily trafficked sites in the world… but to help those that are, I will respond.

“It doesnt work”… doesnt help us help you.
We cant magically see your code to see why it isnt working. You need to show it to us.

Hi StarLion, sounds as though it’s probably not worth my while implementing a cache system then. The site is bloody quick as it is but I’m just being greedy on speed. I didn’t know if this was usual practice for the page to completely reload when a user goes back. Just a very casual question.

Eh… unless you’re using a VERY heavy set of queries, or pounding it with a lot of traffic, the amount of time saved with caching would be insignificant.

Well the site loads pretty quickly, I’m perfectly happy with it, just done a speed test and it says it loads 1.42secs - that ok?

What connection speed is that at?

I don’t know what caching you are looking to implement, but from the sentence it sounds like you want to apply it on the images, css and html. To do that you will need to add the expire times when they are pulled. I.e. Telling the browser that image A is valid for one week from today, that way the browser wont check for an update before a weeks time.

If you want to learn more about content caching, I strongly recommend these two books by O’Reilly.
High Performance Web Sites
Even Faster Web Sites

If you are talking about server side, look into APC or Memcache.

I don’t know if your in the web development business, but if you are I strongly suggest that you look into caching again. Caching is simple, easy to implement and beneficial even for smaller websites.

I wont go on about the topic, as there is a lot of different cache methods, systems and approaches all depending on what you want to cache. The important part however is as normal tied down to money, with the system cached, you save server resources (more websites per server for example if its smaller websites), using less bandwidth and so on.

Apparantly I need to read again, because I dont really see the need for caching on small scale sites at all - if you’ll never tax your server, or approach it’s bandwidth limits…