Once the website is ready, everyone will appreciate your efforts to develop it and at the same time you will see new requests coming in. What can be these new requests will be on? Enhancements? Anomalies? Improvements? Most probably it will be on improvements specially when your client is eyeing to implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Now we all know that below factors are very important or directly proportional to speed up the page load/make the page SEO friendly:

1. Minimized CSS and JS
2. Optimized images
3. One H1 tag per page and alt attributes for image tags.
4. Use of meta tags, OG tags, Twitter cards, etc.
5. Creating Sitemap.xml & Robots.txt

After having all these in place, still you can use caching strategy OOTB given by Sitecore to speed up your page load further. Before we jump to how to implement caching in Sitecore, we need to analyze the renderings which needs caching or which does heavy business logic which in turn increases the page load time.

Lets see the page load time of my home page before implementing caching strategy.

Now lets implement caching on some of the renderings used on Home page.

1. Go to Home item (/sitecore/content/Home).
2. Click on Presentation Tab >> Details >> Edit
3. Go to Controls >> Select the rendering(in my case Featured Services) >> Edit

4. Expand Caching section.
5. Check the Cacheable checkbox to make the rendering cached and also choose the option when you want the cache to cleared & rebuilt again. I want the cache to be cleared whenever the data of the rendering is updated.
6. So Ill choose Vary by data.

7. Similarly, we will check all the renderings on the Home page which takes time while executing business logic or to render the heavy assets and cache it.
8. Once you have marked the required renderings as Cacheable & published the changes to web database.
9. We can clear the browser cache and try to run the site again & run the page speed tool against it.

In this way we can achieve the performance from Sitecore OOTB feature of caching.

To troubleshoot any issues related to Caching, we can use cache.aspx admin page.

Thank you.. Keep Learning.. Keep Sitecoring.. 🙂