Cache Is King vs The Lurking Monster 

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Utilising caching is excellent practice; it will speed up your website, reduce server load and increase revenue for your Ecommerce website. Well, that sounds perfect, doesn’t it? 

In many ways it is, BUT… you could have a monster lurking in the background. 

Let’s paint a common scenario:  

You have built a successful Ecommerce brand; your marketing is working well, and your revenue is growing. 

But then your website slows down. 

Adding more resources is expensive, so you decide to add page caching and object caching to the site, and everything speeds up again. Happy days! Problem solved! … but for how long? 

Let’s look into what is actually happening:  

  1. As your customer base grows = it’s adding more data to the database 
  1. Your orders increase = it’s adding more data to your database 
  1. You expand and add more products = it’s adding more data to your database 
  1. Abandoned shopping carts = adds more data to your database 
  1. No data is being removed 
  1. The database grows at the same time, your transactions increase, and it slows down, potentially leading to a complete database and website crash 

Caching is a great feature to utilise. However, on its own, adding cache can just mask the issue.  

Your passive traffic is fast, but your system grinds to a halt as soon as you log in to the admin panel or start having to process more concurrent orders.  

So where does the lurking monster lie?! 

Usually in the database.  

Many people are unaware of the severe impacts a poorly constructed or extremely large database can have on a growing Ecommerce site. If the database is poorly constructed and is not optimised, this is what causes the website to become slower and slower. 

The database of an Ecommerce site is crucial because all orders, customer information and site content are constantly being pulled from here.  

A developer may presume you simply need more CPU and memory or that the hosting is the issue or inadequate. In most cases this is usually because:  

  1. Web Developer’s expertise predominantly focus on code, not understanding the complexities of database management  
  1. The hosting provider will scale up more and more resources; as this is what they have been asked to do 
  1. Or your hosting provider may have limited or no experience in database optimisation 

So, what should you do? What is the solution? 

You need DevOps! 

  1. A hosting provider that has engineers with an understanding of both the development mindset and system administration. 
  1. You need an engineer who genuinely understands your problems and can communicate them honestly and effectively. 
  1. A DevOps engineer can look at the data, apply experience and deliver a strategy to help you continue to grow. 

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