Website Performance

Website performance is referred to as how quickly the website is loaded, rendered, and visible to the end user. When someone visits a website, he is curious to see the website instantly. When a website fails to show the content quickly, the user loses interest in the website and leaves it.

Website performance is on of the main factor to consider when creating a website. No matter it is a simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript website or a fully dynamic Laravel, MERN, and Django website. Every developer should make the website a fast as possible.

There are a lot of ways to boost the website performance such as compressing/minifying the files, lazy loading, cache, etc. In this blog, we are discussing the static cache control increases website performance.

When the browser requests a resource, the server sends the record and tells the browser to save its copy to local storage. In this way, when the browser requests the same resource then rather than receiving it from the server it is served from the locally stored copy, reducing the time to wait from the server. Hence the website loads very fast. This local copy of the resource is called Static Cache

As you can see, now the page is loaded from the local storage so the browser does not wait for the server to perform various operations, querying the database, creating the resource, and sending back to the browser. This will load website very fast.

A static cache is simply a page that never changes and remains the same every time it is loaded like images, CSS files, JavaScript files, simple HTML pages, etc.

In the case of dynamic cache, the resource will change very frequently or on every request like the e-commerce products page, weather report, etc.

Caching is a good way for website performance but this does not mean you need to cache everything or every request. Cache only a resource that is not going to change like static page, images, CSS, and JS files like a GET request with 200 successful status. Do not try to cache POST, PUT, or DELETE requests because they may contain user data.

You can manage the cache by .htaccess file stored on your server. You can decide what to cache, when to cache, and how long to cache the files.

Alternately, there are package you can use to manage your cache for your laravel website. One of the package is spatie/laravel-responsecache, which is easy to use and integrate.