Caching Methods With WordPress

There are different ways to make your website faster: specialized plugins to cache entire rendered HTML pages, plugins to cache all SQL queries and data objects, plugins to minimize JavaScript and CSS files and even some server-side solutions. But even if you use such plugins, using internal caching methods for objects and database results is a good development practice, so that your plugin doesn’t depend on which cache plugins the end user has.

When you use functions such as get_posts() or get_post_meta(), WordPress first checks to see whether the data you require is cached. If it is, then you will get data from the cache; if not, then a database query is run to get the data. Once the data is retrieved, it is also cached. A non-persistent cache is recommended for database results that might be reused during the creation of a page.