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Comment by rapind | Hacker News Reader

> A bad idea, IMO. It's still going through the PHP server and all of the routing/plugin/DB code within WP. Much better to use Varnish (and its ilk) and avoid overloading the PHP service.

I'm not a big WP fan, but this statement is false in most cases. Page caching in WordPress is usually (always?) serving up the pre-rendered HTML direct from disk (or CDN) without hitting PHP. Pagely (the post we're discussing) even handle that for you w/ their own CDN. I would imagine they also support request based caching and purging, warming, etc.

Most purely content sites (non-app) can run really well with a very simple TTL based cache (instead of long lived w/ complex flushing). You can very easily use something like Fastly for cloud based varnish w/ an appropriate TTL.

I also feel the need to point out that gatsby type sites and just pre-rendering / caching as well, at least in part (possible using json from a CMS for dynamic data).

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> Page caching in WordPress is usually (always?) serving up the pre-rendered HTML direct from disk

I'd be very curious how a WP plugin is managing this.

Third party hosting building in caching, normal in-line caches (like Varnish), nginx/apache caching, sure - I get those, and they behave how you say. But a WP plugin? I'm curious how that would bypass PHP & WP entirely.

A lot of them do it via special htaccess rules. Check the cache first for an html file, otherwise, fall back to PHP. If not, there may be a little php code running but generally much less than a “normal” request.

So I don't normally setup WP sites, but I have as a favour. A caching plugin just generates the HTML files and you configure NGinX / Apache to the appropriate directory. Historically I think most did it via .htaccess w/ Apache for shared hosts, but I've only configured it w/ NGinX. E.g. https://www.nginx.com/blog/9-tips-for-improving-wordpress-pe...

I think a lot of third-party hosts provide this out of the box, maybe even using their own CDN. WP is so popular that it's be difficult not to find a service that handled it all for you so long as you have room in the budget.

Server rewrites. Usually they work adding rules to Apache .htaccess.

On the other hand, this trick was mostly useful years ago when shared hosting plans were really underpowered.

As of today, with improvements of both PHP 7.x and general server performance, even a cache system that uses PHP very early (before any DB connection) to load a pre-rendered html cache file goes a long way in terms of number of pages being served.

Actually, if this become your bottleneck, the .htaccess trick won't help a lot, and you would still look in tools like memcached, redis or reverse proxies to improve things.

>I'd be very curious how a WP plugin is managing this.

If you don't know how the cache plugins do this, it's pretty obvious you are not very knowledgable about WordPress site operations. Please stop spouting falsehoods here.

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