Any dynamic website, whether it is built using PHP, ASP or Java, it will have some delay displaying content while it fetches the data from database, run some functions on the go and display output. This nature of data loading and display will cause higher issues if the server is low on resources and the requests are higher. To run a website under such a scenario is challenging and requires code optimization and query tweaking. While that may help improving situations to some extent, it may not always help. Also with crawlers and bots scanning your website every now and then, on top of it, DDos and other kinds of attacks that can overload your website with bulk of requests, it is always a good idea to have some other alternatives deployed to handle the load.
Multiple techniques can help reduce the load:
- Load Balancing
- CDN Delivery
- Upgrading server hardware
- Deploying server level solutions to improve database efficiency
- Caching Page Output
- Firewall Setup to reduce attacks
Out of all of the above, page caching technique is the easiest to deploy. Not only it is easy, it reduces the server load by almost 90% depending the size of the website.
Now the question is, does page cache work for every site. Answer may be tricky as every website is coded differently but the main areas to look into are: Does website provide login functionality, does the website have millions of pages, does the content on all pages of the website changes frequently, are there modules such as shopping cart which need to dynamic at all times.
If you have answer to all those question, it may be easier to determine if you can deploy page cache. In some cases, even if your current website is not page cache compatible, with minor updates and changes, the page cache can be enabled. The advantage of enabling page cache is that it stores the html output of the page onto disk and has a set expiry, and while the expiry of the file is not reached, the page will be loaded from the cache vs being generated dynamically.
If your website is under load and want to get it optimized and page cache enabled, let us know and we will jump into fixing your business website.