Don’t load it twice: How caching made our higher ed site one of the fastest

This presentation will focus on how Monmouth University’s developers use data caching to speed up their website. These caching techniques not only had a measurable impact on the monmouth.edu page loads, but they also helped the site rise toward the top of the Speedy U charts for site performance.

In this presentation, I will go over the following caching methods:

• Back-end caching: with an emphasis on the WordPress Transients API
• Front-end caching: focusing on storing data in the browser’s local storage
• Full-page caching: services that are available to save static HTML versions of a page for quicker loads. I’ll also go over when not to implement this technique, in order to avoid exposing sensitive content like PII

On top of these methods, I’ll discuss other concepts that will work in tandem with caching:

• Cron jobs: to create caches without a user needing to initiate the process, saving users from waiting longer than needed for a page to load
• Big-O optimizations: caches may help, but developers need to be careful that their scripts don’t slow the site down when processing all that data
• MySQL considerations: caching won’t always work, like for a search form with infinite possible results. I’ll briefly show how to avoid overkill queries that aren’t worth the performance hit