Using Cache Wisely with ExpressionEngine
Whenever ExpressionEngine renders a page, a variety of things happen. A parsing engine runs through the code, database calls are made, variables are replaced, conditional statements are evaluated, third party add-on scripts are run and more. While servers are amazingly fast at doing all of this, sometimes all of these processes can make a page take too many valuable seconds to load.
While it is always best practice to write your code so that the page loads as fast as possible, there are times where caching can come in and save the day by providing lighting-fast load times even for pages with a lot of processing needs. However, there are also times where caching can work against you and actually make the page slower than loading the page without it. I’ll cover the basics of caching in ExpressionEngine, including when not to do it.