WordPress & WooCommerce Caching Guide with Cloudways

What Is Caching and Why Does It Matter?

Every time someone visits a WordPress site without caching, a surprisingly complex chain of events fires off behind the scenes. The browser makes a request, WordPress receives it, queries the database for the right content, assembles everything into HTML and CSS, and finally ships the finished page back to the visitor's browser. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of concurrent visitors and you're asking your server to do a tremendous amount of redundant work.

Caching short-circuits that process by storing a pre-built version of the page so it can be served almost instantly. Think of it like a restaurant with meals already plated and ready at the counter — no waiting for the kitchen. When a cached version exists, WordPress skips the database lookup and the rendering step entirely, handing the visitor a ready-made page in a fraction of the time.

The practical payoff is threefold: faster load times for your visitors, better rankings on Google (Core Web Vitals reward speed), and lower server costs because your hosting doesn't have to work nearly as hard. If you've ever been told to "clear the cache" after making a site change, this is the mechanism behind it — you're telling the system to throw away the stored snapshot and build a fresh one.

Varnish: Server-Level Page Caching

Varnish is the first and most efficient caching layer on a Cloudways server. It operates at the server level, meaning WordPress as an application never even gets involved when a cached page is available. The request comes in, Varnish intercepts it, finds the stored version, and sends it straight back to the visitor. WordPress doesn't wake up, the database stays quiet, and the server barely breaks a sweat.

On Cloudways, Varnish is enabled by default on every new server. You can manage it by navigating to your server dashboard, clicking Manage Services, and scrolling to the bottom. From there you can disable Varnish or purge its contents manually. Purging is useful when you've made changes to your site that aren't showing up on the front end — clearing the cache forces the system to rebuild pages from fresh data.

Server-side page caching like Varnish will always be the most efficient way to serve pages from a single origin server. The trade-off is that it works best for static content. If your pages need to display personalized or user-specific information — like a WooCommerce cart or account dashboard — Varnish alone won't cut it, and that's where the other caching layers come in.

Breeze: Application-Level Page Caching

When you install WordPress on Cloudways, a plugin called Breeze comes pre-installed. Breeze handles page caching at the application level — inside WordPress itself — and acts as a second line of defense behind Varnish. If Varnish doesn't have a cached copy of a page, Breeze can step in and serve its own cached version, which means WordPress still gets hit but doesn't have to do the heavy lifting of querying the database and rendering everything from scratch.

Breeze also has a built-in integration with Varnish. It can automatically purge the Varnish cache whenever you make changes in WordPress, saving you the hassle of navigating through the Cloudways dashboard to do it manually. If the automatic purge doesn't fire for some reason, you can trigger it manually right from within the WordPress admin bar.

The Breeze settings panel has quite a few options, but the most important one for this discussion is the basic cache toggle. Cloudways recommends keeping it enabled at all times, and there's rarely a reason to turn it off. It builds internal static caches for your WordPress pages and works in tandem with Varnish to ensure visitors get the fastest possible experience.

Handling Dynamic Content in WooCommerce

Full page caching is incredibly efficient, but it falls apart the moment your pages need to serve personalized content. WooCommerce is the classic example — you can't cache a user's account page or shopping cart and serve that same snapshot to every visitor, or you'd be handing out other people's order histories and payment details. Any page where the content changes based on who's viewing it is considered dynamic, and it requires a different caching strategy.

This is where object caching enters the picture. Rather than caching the entire finished page, object caching stores the results of common database queries. WordPress still has to process the request and build the page, but instead of making the database do all that work from scratch every time, it can pull frequently-requested data from a much faster cache layer. The result is a significant performance boost for dynamic pages without the security risks of serving stale personalized content.

Memcached and Redis: Database-Level Caching

Cloudways provides two server-side object caching systems: Memcached and Redis. Both are enabled by default, and they serve complementary roles.

Memcached is the simpler of the two. It stores key-value pairs in memory only — nothing is written to disk. It's limited to straightforward data, but what it does, it does very efficiently. Memcached is ideal for reducing repetitive, lightweight database queries, and its low memory footprint means there's virtually no downside to leaving it enabled. You'll find it under Manage Services on your server dashboard.

Redis is the more capable sibling. It can store complex data structures and persist them to disk, which makes it especially valuable for WooCommerce stores, LMS platforms, and any site with heavy dynamic content. Because Redis can handle larger and more complex query results, it's the go-to caching layer for e-commerce workloads where the database is under constant pressure from product lookups, cart calculations, and user session data.

Object Cache Pro: The WooCommerce Secret Weapon

Redis on its own needs a WordPress plugin to actually connect and work with your site. The standard free plugin in the WordPress repository will get the job done for basic setups, but Cloudways includes Object Cache Pro at no extra cost on any server with at least two gigabytes of RAM. This is a significant perk — Object Cache Pro normally starts at $95 per month per site, which adds up to $950 a year.

The killer feature of Object Cache Pro is its native WooCommerce integration. The free Redis plugin doesn't understand WooCommerce's query patterns, so it plays it safe and skips caching most e-commerce database requests to avoid serving stale data. Object Cache Pro, on the other hand, knows exactly which WooCommerce queries are safe to cache and how to handle them, which means your store's most resource-intensive operations get dramatically faster.

When you spin up a WordPress site on a Cloudways server with 2GB or more of memory, Object Cache Pro comes pre-installed, activated, and configured. There's nothing to set up — it just works out of the box alongside Redis.

Edge Caching with Cloudflare Enterprise

The third and most powerful page caching option on Cloudways is edge caching through their Cloudflare Enterprise integration. Unlike Varnish, which caches pages on your origin server, edge caching stores your entire page on Cloudflare's global network of servers. When a visitor requests your site, they're served from the nearest Cloudflare node — not from your server at all. This means zero load on your origin server for cached pages and blazing-fast delivery worldwide.

To enable it, navigate to your application in the Cloudways dashboard and click the Cloudflare option. Cloudflare Enterprise starts at $5 per month for a single site, which also includes a CDN, image optimization, DDoS protection, a web application firewall, and mobile optimization. Once it's active, Cloudways recommends disabling Varnish on your server since edge caching supersedes it entirely. Redis and Object Cache Pro should stay enabled — they'll continue handling dynamic e-commerce requests that can't be edge-cached.

The setup process is straightforward: enter your domain, click enable, and follow the DNS instructions Cloudways provides. Once configured, your full page caching happens at the edge while Redis handles the dynamic database layer. It's the most efficient caching configuration available on the platform.

Real-World Load Testing: Cached vs. Uncached

Theory is one thing — results are another. To demonstrate the real impact of caching, a load test was run using Loader.io against a Cloudways server with 4GB of RAM and faster CPU cores. The test ramped from 1 to 500 concurrent visitors over 60 seconds, first with all caching disabled, then with the full caching stack enabled.

With caching completely off — no Varnish, no Redis, no Breeze, no Object Cache Pro — the results were grim. Response times climbed past 500 milliseconds within the first five seconds, at which point only about 15 users were on the site. By 50 concurrent visitors the server was already at 2.5-second response times, and it hit the error threshold and aborted the test entirely around the 22-second mark with roughly 200 visitors. For an e-commerce store running a product launch, that kind of performance would be catastrophic.

With Varnish, Breeze, Redis, and Object Cache Pro all enabled, the same test told a completely different story. The average response time across the entire run was just 132 milliseconds. At 10 seconds in, response times sat at 43 milliseconds. Even as the test approached 500 concurrent visitors, response times only climbed to about 250 milliseconds — still well under the half-second target. The test completed without a single error. That's the difference between a site that collapses under moderate traffic and one that handles a serious spike without breaking a sweat.

The Bottom Line on Cloudways Caching

Cloudways takes what would normally be a complex, multi-tool server administration task and makes it nearly turnkey. Out of the box, every new server comes with Varnish enabled for full page caching, Memcached running for lightweight query caching, Redis active for heavier database workloads, and Object Cache Pro pre-installed on servers with 2GB or more of RAM. The Breeze plugin ties the WordPress side together automatically.

For most WordPress sites, the default configuration is all you need. If you're running WooCommerce or handling serious traffic, enabling Cloudflare Enterprise edge caching for $5 per month and disabling Varnish in favor of the edge layer gives you the most powerful setup available. You could piece all of this together yourself on a DIY server, but you'd be paying for Object Cache Pro alone more than many Cloudways plans cost — and you'd be spending hours on configuration that Cloudways handles in minutes.

Whether you're running a simple blog or a high-traffic WooCommerce store, a properly configured caching stack is non-negotiable. It's the difference between a site that feels sluggish at 15 visitors and one that handles 500 concurrent users at sub-250ms response times.

Watch the Full Video

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