Nope, not an ad for increasing your sexual performance. I think we all get enough of those. My spam filters just can’t keep up with it. No, this is about website caching and performance techniques.
I have long noticed that the ol’ family website is a bit slow to load but really didn’t have any tools to figure out why. Compressing the template would probably have helped but really, how much? Would it be worth it? (Some might argue that any improvement is generally worth it but I’m one of those believers in doing the big items first, the rest can follow).
Came across a CMS component (I use Joomla on the site so everything is database driven, query oriented) that offered page caching. Installation was pretty easy and so far, the component is well-behaved. So check out joomlaperformance and grab the component for your situation. If you don’t use Joomla, well, then this tool won’t help you but you can read about the technology
Page caching is simply storing a local copy of the webpage on the server and serving that up every time it gets accessed. The page would update every time something is “old”. (The definition of old is configurable and currently set to 10 minutes but on this site 24 hours might be enough – we don’t change it often enough really to warrant every 10 minutes).