FacetWP – Caching

Make FacetWP-powered pages load quicker by caching FacetWP-specific AJAX requests in the database.

The Caching add-on can help speed up high-traffic pages with commonly used facet combinations because it prevents FacetWP from having to calculate the choices for each facet on each page load.

How it works

Each unique facet filter combination that is used by a visitor will be cached in the database and retrieved from the cache the next time someone chooses that combination. If you have many users selecting a lot of different unique combinations (e.g. entering their own location or making random assortments of facet selections), then caching the AJAX requests isn’t going to help much because those combinations will not have been cached yet. So the Caching add-on will only be effective on frequently visited pages (like landing pages) with only a few facets and facet options/combinations that are used often.

The FacetWP Caching add-on compliments other caching plugins. It doesn’t cache anything else than its own AJAX requests, so it will not negatively affect other caching systems you are using. It can be used side-by-side with other caching plugins like WP Rocket because most of them intentionally ignore AJAX requests.

Installation

Simply install the plugin and activate it.

If you want to make sure the plugin actually works, see below for instructions on how to check if the wp_facetwp_cache database table exists and has entries, and possible causes and fixes if this is not the case.

Setting the expiration

Depending on how often your content changes, you may want to experiment with the cache expiration time. By default, the cache expires after 1 hour (3600 seconds).

If your content only changes weekly or monthly, it would make sense to increase the cache lifetime as well. If your content rarely changes you could set the cache to a really long expiration time, then manually clear it when necessary. That’s actually what we do on facetwp.com because our demo content almost never changes.