Author: Tom

In the previous two posts, I’ve talked about the basics of caching and how caching works in WordPress, at least to a degree.

But remember that this series was motivated by an email from someone who thought that I could do a better job of explaining how transients and caching work in WordPress and why it’s important to understand how everything works in tandem with each other.

So in this post, I’m aiming to bring it all together and talk about how the Transients API works in conjunction with MySQL, why it’s important to understand the relationship, and how to handle this moving forward.

In the previous post, I shared a basic primer for how database-backed applications – specifically WordPress – work without caching.

And before we talk about how basic caching works in WordPress, namely with the Transients API, it’s important to discuss the basic principles of caching. This includes why we do it, its benefits, and how it works.

Then we’ll get into how we can take advantage of basic facilities in WordPress to actually do this.

Back in may, I wrote an article about using the WordPress Transients API. I summarize the article like this:

To simulate cookies and their feature of expiration, using WordPress transients may be a viable solution.

https://tommcfarlin.com/using-wordpress-transients/

Though the purpose of the article was to lay out a foundation for how we can design a class to work with the Transients API to simulate the behavior of cookies, one of the side effects of the article is that it didn’t do a good job of explaining how the Transients API (and, by proxy, how MySQL) works.

This was brought to my attention via email by David at UpDraft Plus.

So I thought it useful to talk about the concept of caching from a practical level, how it’s implemented in WordPress, then maybe look at we how to utilize plugins or newer technology to better power our sites and applications as well as have a better understanding.