Mini Masterclasses: Tools of the trade

The next in our series of Mini Masterclasses - quick, practical guides designed to give you a better understanding of the tools and tech that power your digital presence - in this installment, we’re shining a light on caching tools and content delivery networks (CDNs). Two behind-the-scenes players who do a lot of heavy lifting to keep your website running smoothly and loading quickly.

If you’ve ever wondered why updates to your site don’t appear straight away, or how websites manage to stay fast and accessible across the globe, this one’s for you. From bots that act like digital night-shift workers to networks that span continents, let’s explore how caching tools and content delivery networks work - and why we rely on them to deliver the best performance for our clients’ websites.

Caching Tools

Tools that ‘cache’ a website are basically bots. They browse a website before any user does, to make a copy of the site; this way, any ‘thinking’ the website has to do doesn’t get done on the user’s time. Try to think of caching as the digital equivalent of what your body accomplishes while you sleep, which is basically all the maintenance tasks you don’t have enough energy for while you’re awake.

When the caching tool has completed its work, the website the user is given is the version that the caching tool saw when it began its work. This - and here’s the crux of it - is why changes to your website may not instantly show up; the caching tool will need to run back through the website and update the content on the cached version.

CDN’s

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a group of computers located in different places across a country or even the world. When lots of people visit a website at once, it can put a lot of pressure on the website’s main server, a bit like too many people calling the same phone number at the same time. A CDN helps by sharing the load, so the website doesn’t slow down or crash.

It also means that no matter where you are in the world, the website should load quickly. Even though it’s all online, data still takes time to travel, so having computers in different places helps make everything feel faster and smoother.

How do caching tools and CDNs work together?

These systems work together harmoniously by scratching each other’s backs. CDNs need to be able to provide users with something to see, so they borrow the latest cached version of the website and store that. Each computer on the CDN will check for updates at a different time to prevent the central server from getting too many requests all at once. Makes sense, right?

As a result of this, the site may face ‘propagation’ issues - this means that a website change might be visible for some users but not for others. This depends completely on which network computer is providing the website version a user is looking at. It does, however, mean that no matter what, each user will eventually see changes on the website - and the most recent version - in a super-quick fashion.

What do we use?

If you’re a client of ours, or are thinking of becoming one, you’ll be pleased to know that we employ these tools on each site we run, as we know how important website speed is to you and your customers. The tools we specifically use are called LiteSpeed Cache and Quic.Cloud, and together these create lightning-fast websites which perform really well in search results and complement a great business with a strong digital presence.