The ProPhoto software can provide page caching to improve the speed and performance of your website.
What is page cache?
When someone tries to visit a page of your site, the web server must gather all the information which makes up the page. This might include images, the page text, the date and time of a blog post, a group of gallery images, and lots more. Once all the page info has been gathered and put together, your browser loads all the info to display the web page. All of this has a fancy name: time to first byte or TTFB which can impact your search rank if your server response time is very slow.
Since most web pages don’t change very frequently, building the page like this for each visit can waste a lot of time! Page caching helps by storing a “built version” of the page as a single file on your web server. This file can be loaded much more quickly if the pieces of the page haven’t been changed.
How to use ProPhoto page cache
You can enable ProPhoto page cache in the “ProPhoto > Settings > Site Settings > Misc” screen in ProPhoto, shown here:
Turn on page caching, and everything is handled for you. The first time a page is visited, your server will build a small file for the page markup and save it for reuse. Each subsequent visit to the page will load much more quickly for anyone who visits it.
About expiration
You’ll notice a box for the number of minutes to keep cached pages. After this amount of time, the cached pages will be recreated to ensure that any changes to the page are loaded.
ProPhoto also recreates cached pages when it detects that you’ve made changes to the page – in WordPress or in your ProPhoto software – so you shouldn’t need to edit the default expiration time.
About purge page cache button
This area also includes a button that forces ProPhoto to delete all cache files at once, which should only be needed if you are making changes to a page but don’t see your changes applied when viewing the page.
What about caching plugins?
You will probably find that WordPress caching plugins are more complicated and unnecessary when you have ProPhoto page cache built-in.
However, some caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache may provide additional control over the caching features they provide. If you have a specific need for control over caching, you might consider disabling ProPhoto page cache in favor of a plugin.