How to Implement Caching in PHP Application

Caching is a mechanism to save a HTML version of your dynamic pages and server these HTML pages instead of dynamic pages. In this way, your server will not have to process PHP script or run various database query. It will make your website faster. your website will also use less server resources. If you are on shared hosting, it will help you a lot in making your website faster.

If you are using a CMS, implementing caching is easy. Most of the CMS comes with caching add-on or plugin. In WordPress there are few nice caching WordPress plugins available. But what if you have coded PHP script manually. In this case, you can add caching manually in your PHP application. Few days back while working on my gadgets project, I faced heavy resource usage problem. So, I tried adding caching in PHP manually and got success. After adding caching I was able to improve the load time and host more traffic on the shared hosting environment. But you should also have good hosting for better speed. See recommended Web Hosting providers.

Also Read: Reliable Web hosting with Bluehost

I also thought to share the same process with our readers. I am adding the basic process, not the same I added. You can change it to improve as per your requirement and expertise.

Note: This code is for server side caching. Cache pages will be stored in a cache folder. And you also need to give write permission to this caching folder.

<?php
$time_start = microtime(true);
$url = md5($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]);
$cachefile = 'cache/'.$url.'.cache'; // e.g. cache/index.php.cache
$cachetime = 3600; // time to cache in seconds

if(file_exists($cachefile) && time()-$cachetime <= filemtime($cachefile)){
$c = @file_get_contents($cachefile);
echo $c;
$time_end = microtime(true);
$time = $time_end - $time_start;

echo "<!-- cache page generated in: ".$time." -->";
exit;
}

ob_start();

////

/// Your code PHP goes here.

////

$c = ob_get_contents();

$time_end = microtime(true);
$time = $time_end - $time_start;
echo "<!-- non cache page in: ".$time." -->";
file_put_contents($cachefile, $c);

?>

I am using this code to cache pages in my gadgets.techlomedia.in website. It is working fine and saving thousands of SQL queries every hours. In this way, I can better utilize my web hosting server.

I recommend you to use this code to cache your PHP application pages. If you face any problem, you can ask me any time via the comments section below.