OpenCart Varnish Cache

For giant online websites, faster loading pages is a must. Of course, such websites have to entertain thousands of customers each day.

Just imagine, if while navigating through some world-renowned website, customers had to sit impatiently, waiting for the buffer sign to disappear, it would be a complete a turn down for the website.

Thus, to improve the performance of a website, one can integrate the OpenCart Varnish Cache Module feature for sure as it's caching scenarios can turn out to be a boon for heavy websites, and even for websites that deal with large customers on a daily basis.

The reason being, it caches the requests and thereby responses, resulting in faster page load times.

Apart from this, the website's resources can be stored in a compressed form in the varnish, which ensures a lesser bandwidth consumption. Through integrating the Varnish Caching feature can enhance the performance of the website, which in turn shall lure more customers to the store and converting visitors of a store to permanent customers.

The store owners will have to set the following configurations in order to activate the varnish cache feature within their websites.

• Once enabled, the admin needs to set the IP address of the host/ client and backend port number.
• A list of IP’s is defined by the admin under the access list.
• The first byte, between byte and connection timeout durations (in secs), is set by the admin.
• The admin sets a grace period or the time duration for which the client can hold the website resources.
• Time-to-live duration is set in seconds, which helps reduce the bandwidth consumption of the website.
• Bypass URL includes URL of the website's pages which do not require caching.
• The admin can enable the backend polling and accept-encoding fields.

Cache through Varnish can turn out to be a boon for heavy websites, Some of the benefits it inlays are as follows:-

• It is useful for websites that deal with large customers on a daily basis.
• A website’s resources can be stored in the varnish cache in compressed form.
• Improvises a website’s performance by optimizing its speed.
• A website would consume a comparatively lesser bandwidth.
• VCL or Varnish Configuration Language helps identify duplicate requests, resulting in precise caching.

With Google announcing upcoming algorithm update on ranking factor, measurement, and page experience. The site owners are now guided with three key metrics (LCP, FID, CLS) that are essential for delivering a great user experience.

• Largest Contentful Paint (Loading) - It measures the time taken to show the main content element (such as a large image or text) to the user. This is useful to check page rendering time and loading performance.
• First Input Delay (Interactivity) - It checks how quickly a page responds to user interaction (such as clicking a link or tapping a button).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (Visual Stability) - It scores unexpected page layout shifts (such as - movement of text, link, button) during the loading phase.

Opencart  SEO Extension and Opencart Cache System offer various important features (WebP Image Optimization, Improve Lighthouse Page Performance, Minify & Combine CSS, JS, HTML files, CDN Loading, Leverage Cache). Helping to optimize your web store content and support upcoming 2021 Google Algorithm UX changes with Core Web Vitals.