Network Edge, Full Page Caching is here for our WordPress managed hosting customers

Speed matters. When visitors come to your website, they expect quick loading times. Slow websites can lead to frustrated users and lost opportunities. To ensure your WordPress site delivers the fastest experience possible, we’re excited to offer a new feature: Network Edge Full Page Caching.

What is Edge Full Page Caching?

It’s a powerful enhancement that stores your website’s HTML content on servers distributed globally through Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN). This means your website’s pages are cached and delivered from locations closer to your visitors, drastically improving load times and overall performance.

Why Does This Matter?

1. Faster Load Times: When someone visits your website, their browser requests the page’s content. Without caching, these requests travel all the way to the original server, which can be far from the visitor’s location. With Edge Full Page Caching, the HTML files are stored on Cloudflare’s servers around the world. This proximity reduces the time it takes to deliver the page, resulting in faster load times.

2. Improved User Experience: A quicker website means a better experience for your visitors. Faster load times can lead to longer visits, lower bounce rates, and increased engagement.

3. Enhanced Performance: By serving HTML files from Cloudflare’s CDN, we also reduce the load on our primary servers. This makes our infrastructure more efficient and reliable, ensuring your site remains fast and available even during traffic spikes.

How Does It Work?

Previously, only static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript were cached using Cloudflare’s CDN. HTML files, the core content of your pages, were served directly from our servers. With Edge Full Page Caching, these HTML files are now also cached and delivered from Cloudflare’s network. This places the content closer to your visitors, improving the Time to First Byte (TTFB) and reducing latency.

Who Can Benefit?

Edge Full Page Caching is available for primary domains configured with our advanced network settings. The majority of our Managed WordPress Hosting customers are already configured in such a way that we can enable this service now, meaning no additional DNS update are required to take advantage of this new feature.

The DMA Team’s Rollout Plan

The team at The DMA will be rolling out the caching update over the next month (July and August 2024). If you are monitoring your website’s page load times with a tool like Google Lighthouse, you will see an improvement after this tool is enabled for your site.

Currently, this feature is not available for e-commerce websites or sites with complex interactive features.