I'm assuming just rendering HTML has a huge speed impact? We'd edit the pages as normal via php but do a HTML build at the end of the night.
I've found a couple of things but they seem to want to make you start a site like that. I have an ecommerce site I'd like to make html to speed things up... I assume it will?
I could be (probably am) talking nonsense but an online shop as big as bodybuilding.com surely can't be hand coding html pages?
@cshelswell No, they won’t be converted pages to HTML. Although HTML is generated by PHP and served to the end user, so you can cache that response. Either using HTTP headers so the same user will get a cached version on subsequent visits, or at the server-level so your server caches the page, and then all users get served this cached version.
This does however introduce you to one of the two hardest things in programming: cache invalidation. If you need to publish a change, you need to work out how to invalidate your cached version. How you do that depends on what strategy you use to cache.
@cshelswell It really depends on the level of traffic you’re getting. Are you really getting so much that your web site is grinding to a halt and that your hosting bills are spiralling out of control? As it may be you can make some quick wins caching an expensive database query or whatnot before introducing new things like Varnish into your tech stack that’s going to increase development time, knowledge required to work on the project, and introduce new problems (i.e. cache invalidation).
Other than, no, caching doesn’t have an SEO affect (as it’s the same HTML delivered whether it’s cached or dynamic). If there’s a massive difference in loading times between your cached version and dynamic version, then it may have a tiny affect on rankings, but you’re not going to shoot to the top of Google because you have a “fast” website, and especially if the different is only negligible (i.e. one or two milliseconds).
