As traffic to your WordPress website increases, pages load slowly over time. This is natural.
The hosting server is handling more requests at the same time. If all your visitors download, comment, and submit files at the same time, your entire website can crash.
At this point, website owners may be wondering: content delivery network (CDN). ” It helps, but it literally comes at a cost. In contrast, caching is a way to increase the speed of your website without purchasing additional bandwidth.
This is where Memcached comes into play. Memcached uses server memory to speed up your website. This gives users near-instantaneous, on-demand access while slowing down page load speeds.
Join us as we explain how to use Memcached with WordPress, how it works, its benefits, and how to install it on your server.
Here’s exactly what you’ll learn:
What is Memcached?
Memcached is a high-performance, easy-to-use memory caching system that accelerates dynamic web applications.
Brad Fitzpatrick developed this open source solution for his website LiveJournal. At the moment, Memcached is used by most popular websites, mobile apps, games, and e-commerce platforms.
Although Memcached can be used as a standalone solution, it typically works with:
- PHP
- Django (Python)
- ruby on rail
- Mongo DB
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
When you use WordPress with Memcached, your website visitors enjoy incredibly fast response times.
how? Memcached allows you to store frequently used data on your host server. The next time you need data, your server no longer needs to request it from the database or search your disk drives.
The Memcached object cache can store as many as an integer or a complete HTML page in RAM.
What do you do when you run out of space? Memcached overwrites the least used data.
This all sounds good, but before you enable Memcached in WordPress, you need to know a little more about the program.
How does Memcached work?
Memcached stores frequently used data in the server’s RAM. This is easier to access than requesting information from a database. Because there is no need to talk to a database, search disk drives, or transfer information, applications can access data in microseconds instead of seconds.
This reduces the time it takes for your website to respond. Application planning interface (API) and database calls and page rendering.
So how does it work? Here’s a basic overview:
- An application (such as a web page) sends a data request to a Memcached server using a unique key to identify the data it wants.
- When a request is received, Memcached accesses the RAM cache to see if the requested data is already stored there. If it exists, Memcached will deliver the data. Mission complete.
- Let’s say the data doesn’t exist. In this case, Memcached accesses the database on the backend of her website, retrieves the information, and stores it in memory. The information you requested will also be displayed.
If your application requests the same data in the future, the Memcached service retrieves the data from memory instead of from the database.
However, this data is not permanently stored in RAM. Memcached sets an expiration time and automatically removes it from memory, creating space for future use.
Using WordPress with Memcached thus reduces the load on your backend database, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and more scalable website for you and your audience.
Benefits of using Memcached on your WordPress site
There are many reasons to enable Memcached on your WordPress website. Let’s take a closer look below.
Memcached reduces response times to microseconds
In-memory data eliminates the need for multiple round trips to the database and application. This reduces the time required to retrieve data, resulting in incredible speeds that improve app performance and user experience.
For many people, this is enough to start setting up WordPress Memcached. Imagine that response time is measured in millionths of a second.
Memcached is flexible
WordPress and Memcached allow you to handle a variety of data types, including simple data structures such as integers and strings. It can also handle arrays and objects such as documents, images, and videos.
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Memcached is user friendly
Memcached is designed to be versatile and easy to use. Memcached is also open source and supported by many programming languages including Java, PHP, C, C++, C#, Python, and Go. It also supports multiple database languages, including MongoDB and MySQL.
Memcached is scalable
Memcached uses a multithreaded architecture, which allows multiple tasks to run simultaneously within a single process. This allows it to scale across servers to handle high traffic levels. As your audience grows, scale up by adding nodes to your existing node structure.
You can also increase your computing power by using multiple core processors on a single node, which provides faster and more consistent performance.
Memcached reduces database load
Using WordPress with Memcached reduces the number of database queries your host server has to send to retrieve information from your database. This means the database processes fewer requests at once. do Anything that needs to be processed will be processed faster.
It is also less likely that the server will become overloaded. This minimizes the risk of his website going offline due to server downtime.
Memcached has a large and supportive community
Memcached has a large community supporting open source projects, so you can always find help when you need it. Memcached relies on open standards and supports open data formats. This is made possible by the support of an active community.
Memcached is cost effective
By using WordPress with Memcached enabled, you can avoid expensive hosting plans and hardware upgrades that your business doesn’t really need yet. Optimize your website performance with Memcached without it You need to buy more processors and bandwidth.
WordPress Memcached pre-setup benchmark
When you enable Memcached in WordPress, the goal is to improve slow database queries and improve overall website performance.
This raises the following questions: Exactly how well is your website currently performing? Before you begin the setup process, it’s a good idea to take note of your current situation.
There are many tools you can use to monitor your website speed. Google Insights about page speed It’s a great place to start.
To test your website, go to the PageSpeed Insights home page, enter the URL in the search box, and then click analyse To get results.
under Diagnose performance issues Pay attention to the tab. Metrics section. Analyze your website performance in detail. Use these as a baseline before activating Memcached.
How to enable Memcached in WordPress
Once you’ve set your performance baseline, let’s see how much you can reduce your page load speed. First, how you set up WordPress Memcached depends on several factors.
Some hosting providers offer caching support by default. If it is not installed, you can manually install Memcached on your server if you have the appropriate permissions. Access to network protocols.
If you have access to network protocols, you will need to access the server’s Secure Shell (SSH).
If that’s not an option for you, contact your hosting provider and ask them to enable Memcached on your WordPress website.
Using SSH
Once you get it Accessed the server’s SSH command promptYou can install Memcached using the , Linux command. It’s best to understand how your server’s specific Linux distribution works.
For example, Debian and Ubuntu operating systems use slightly different commands than Fedora and Redhat. If you have questions about your Linux distribution’s installation commands, please refer to its documentation.
On Ubuntu, use the following command:
apt-get install memcachedOn Redhat, use the following command:
yum install memcachedOnce done, go to your WordPress dashboard, download a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache, and configure the WordPress Memcached module.
Contact your web hosting provider
Memcached is popular software and many hosting providers preinstall it on their servers.
Please check with your host. If your host has Memcached preinstalled, you can enable it from the control panel. If it’s not pre-installed on your host, you can ask your support staff to set it up for you.
Final thoughts: Enabling Memcached on WordPress to get the most out of your hosting solution
Memcached remains a widely popular caching system due to its simplicity, speed, and scalability. This is an efficient way to store and retrieve data in server memory, reducing back-end database workload and optimizing performance.
Memcached’s flexibility and wide compatibility make it a valuable tool for all types of WordPress website owners, as long as they have enough RAM.
If you’re looking for hosting that supports high-performance websites, consider Nexcess. Nexcess offers Redis for object caching with the Object Cache Pro plugin for integration into WordPress.
Plus, you’ll get access to 32 GB of RAM. Enterprise WordPress Hosting Get 10,000 GB of bandwidth from Nexcess. contact us today to discuss your hosting needs or enable Memcached on your WordPress website.
This blog was first published in December 2017. It has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
