What are the best practices for caching HTML? Should it be avoided?

Question

I have been working on a few factors to optimize my webpages. I have optimized the delivery of everything else and now I am thinking about making some optimization related to the HTML.

Since HTML can change frequently I was thinking caching it would be counter productive or an overkill but I know exactly when my HTML is going to change ( it changes every six hours). Is caching my webpage for lets say 1 or 2 hours worth it? What are some best practice that I should follow in case I decide to cache HTML?

Answer 1

For most smaller to midsize web sites, I would think this would be overkill.

In order to determine how much time is being saved, the question is: how large is a given page on a site, and how often will people be clicking between pages? (Or, for that matter, are your users on particularly slow connections?) Unless the pages are very large, or people are spending a lot of time clicking between pages, the time spent loading the pure HTML should not be especially significant.

The CSS and JavaScript, sure, that makes sense to cache, but I believe most browsers handle that caching automatically. But loading HTML content is a relatively quick process; unless you are using a vast amount of HTML-generated graphics or other items (eg HTML5's SVG) I can't see much need to store that for later.

Think about how your users browse your sites - will they be visiting each page only a few times, or is your site built in such a way that they have to keep clicking back and forth between pages?

Any site that would have people clicking back and forth sufficiently often to merit this might benefit from being built as a single-page application (SPA). If people are clicking back and forth enough that caching HTML becomes a serious concern, it might be better to think of those as different parts of one page.