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Boost Your Bottom Line with Full Page Caching
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, website performance is a critical factor for success. In fact sites that load in 1 second can have an e-commerce conversion rate 2.5x higher than sites that load in 5 seconds. For e-commerce businesses, this translates to lost revenue and a diminished customer experience.
During peak shopping seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the strain on e-commerce websites can be even more severe. Slow load times and website crashes can lead to significant losses.
For large-scale e-commerce sites with millions of product pages, managing search engine crawl budgets can be a daunting task. The sheer volume of daily updates often exceeds the available crawl budget, hindering search engine visibility.
A full page cache offers a powerful solution to these challenges. Storing static versions of web pages closer to users dramatically reduces page load times, improves user experience, and ensures stability during peak traffic.
Let's explore how a full-page cache can benefit your e-commerce business.
What Is Full-Page Caching
Full-page caching is a technique used to improve website performance by storing complete, rendered web pages in memory or on disk. When a user sends a request to your server, a CDN or load balancer redirects the request to the cache and serves the webpage instead of rendering the page and generating it from scratch, which involves processing database queries and running back-end logic. By removing these steps, you can serve your webpage much quicker.
How Does Full-Page Caching Work
Populating Cache: When a user first visits a page, the backend server generates the content by querying a database and running backend logic. This page is rendered and served to the user. If caching is handled as a background process (e.g., similar to the diagram above), the server caches the page using backend server logic. At the same time, a CDN or load balancer routes future requests to the cache.
Caching System: The rendered HTML is stored (cached) in a data storage layer, either in memory (e.g., Redis, Memcached, HarperDB) or on disk. The data is typically saved as a string or in binary format.
Subsequent requests: For future requests, the server checks the cache first. If the page exists in the cache and is still valid, it is delivered directly from the cache, removing the need to regenerate the content.
Pros & Cons Of Full-Page Caching
Pros
Full-page caching is used by various large-scale companies in different verticals. Some include Shopify, Reddit, and even Facebook, to name a few. These companies, and many more, use full-page caching for multiple use cases, which include:
SEO Benefits: Faster page load times can improve search engine rankings in two ways. First, faster load time improves Core Web Vitals (CWV), leading to better rankings. Second, search engines such as Google limit how much time a bot can spend on your website, and any pages that are not crawled within that window will not be indexed or ranked. Faster page load time increases the volume of pages that can be indexed in a given amount of time.
Database Bottlenecks: Dynamic page generation often relies heavily on database queries. If many users access your website simultaneously, the database can become a bottleneck, causing slowdowns or failures. Full-page caching minimizes database queries by serving cached versions of pages, reducing the load on the database.
Cost of Scaling Infrastructure: Without caching, a website would require more powerful servers, databases, and possibly a more complex infrastructure to handle high traffic. Full-page caching helps reduce the need to upgrade to expensive infrastructure by optimizing resource usage.
Network Latency: If a website’s server is far from the user, the time it takes to retrieve and process data can increase, leading to high latency. Full-page caching can be geo-distributed, which stores cached pages closer to users globally, thereby reducing latency.
Cons
Full-page caching is not just a one-size-fits-all solution; it can also have drawbacks.
Stale Content: If not correctly invalidated, cached pages may serve outdated content. If dynamic content is frequently updated, the cache may not reflect these changes immediately.
Complexity of Cache Invalidation: Managing cache invalidation can be challenging, especially for dynamic websites where content frequently changes (e.g., e-commerce stores with changing product availability). This requires careful consideration when configuring your TTL (Time to Live) and cache-control headers.
Personalization Issues: Full-page caching struggles with personalized content. If a website offers personalized views (e.g., logged-in user dashboards), caching may serve incorrect or non-personalized content.
Full-Page Caching VS Partial-Page Caching
You might have noticed from the pros and cons outlined above that full-page caching works well for static websites (websites where the content does not change) but falls short with SPAs (Single-Page Applications), which typically generate dynamic pages and personalize content. You would be correct.
Full-page caching is suited for optimizing the storage of static content and should not be used for frequently updated pages.
However, if your website is an SPA, you should only cache the parts of your site that do not need to be updated frequently.
For example, You should not cache the Facebook newsfeed or an analytics dashboard.
However, you could cache Facebook Marketplace posts or your website's homepage.
CDN VS Custom Solution
If you Google around looking for a full-page caching solution, you will find multiple CDN vendors that offer a turnkey solution. Using a CDN is an excellent choice if you're caching a static website with only a few thousand pages.
For larger sites with a product catalog containing over a million products, you may need a more bespoke solution to handle your site's unique needs (e.g., TTL policy, cache control headers, how frequently your cache is updated, and how it is updated).
For example, if your site is a single-page app with lots of dynamic data, an off-the-shelf CDN cache layer may not have the flexibility to accommodate your requirements.
Bespoke cache solutions are extremely common, but- as the name implies- require more effort and financial investment to deploy. An alternative is to use HarperDB’s turn-key distributed application platform.
A Scalable, Performant Middle Path
For many use cases, the right answer lies somewhere between a static CDN and a full custom solution. Enter HarperDB.
Performance out of the Box: With HarperDB, you get built-in caching functionality that allows you to store and serve cached data directly from structured tables, ensuring low latency responses. HarperDB is optimized for speed, offering a distributed, high-performance solution that can serve data quickly. By using the pre-built HarperDB full-page caching component, we remove complex deployments and simplify the development process of implementing a custom solution.
More Flexible Than Static CDNs: HarperDB’s caching isn’t limited to static content delivery. It allows you to store and serve data in various formats, such as JSON, CSV, or MessagePack, depending on your needs. You can even perform customized queries on cached data, making HarperDB more adaptable than a static CDN.
More Cost-Effective: Building a caching system from scratch can require significant time and resources. HarperDB provides the same level of customization and performance but at a much lower cost. Its built-in caching and data storage capabilities allow you to reduce server load and speed up page delivery without the need to invest in expensive custom caching infrastructure.
More Performant Than Ad-Hoc Solutions: Ad-hoc caching setups can suffer from inefficiency, lack of consistency, and complex management. HarperDB’s caching system, however, leverages timestamps and tags to ensure precise caching control and flexibility, including configurable TTL (Time to Live) policies. This enables HarperDB to efficiently manage cache expiration, automatic updates, and invalidation, ensuring that pages are always served quickly and accurately. By automating these processes, HarperDB reduces the risks of stale data and the overhead of manual cache management, delivering more reliable performance than most ad-hoc solutions.
Conclusion
As you can see, full-page caching can be a powerful technique for enhancing your website's performance. Reducing load times and alleviating strain on your database can lead to better user experiences and improved SEO rankings.
However, it’s essential to consider your site's specific needs. For dynamic or frequently changing content, a more nuanced approach—like employing partial caching strategies—may be necessary to ensure that users receive the most relevant information.
In the end, assessing your project's needs and recognizing the associated trade-offs will help you decide whether a standard full-page caching solution or a customized approach is more suitable for your site's success.
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