Caching

Cache originally comes from the French word "caché", which means "to store".

In short, caching is a technique for increasing the speed of websites. But how does it work? Here's the answer to that.

When a user types your URL into their browser, what happens is that the user's ISP says to your web server "hey... we want to see this website". Your web server then starts "digging it up". When you "dig up" a webshop on a web server, your server first has to ask the database "Which products and categories are actually on the front page?".

Then the database answers that.

"Ahh... I just need the name, price, one image, a URL and a stock status for all the products," the server says.

The database then has to look up the information and serve it to the server.

Of course, it all happens very quickly, but often there are many database lookups and other "calculations" that need to take place.

Instead of doing all this every time a user needs to use a page on the webshop, you can examine what the website looks like right now and save it. In other words, save the entire website so that when a user comes by, they only see what you've saved. You now get rid of all those posts.

Of course, there is the disadvantage that if the product is sold out, it will still appear on the front page. So you shouldn't use a three-day-old cache for that. But the solution is to "build your cache" at regular intervals. You can easily build the cache without a user visiting the website. So your web server can build the cache every 15 minutes, for example. Then you only have to do the database lookups four times an hour instead of every time a visitor comes. And all those visitors get a faster website.

Does Shoporama have caching?

We can guarantee you that we do. We've even expanded the feature to have two types of cache you can enable. This means that you can cache a block of a website. Either something that is very time-consuming to build or something that doesn't change very often. This can be cached over a longer period of time.

This is also why you will often find Shoporama shops to be much faster than other shops.

When should you use caching?

Our recommendation is that you always use caching. However, especially during peak times such as Black Friday and if you're running a sale, it's a good idea to activate your cache.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.