What are the endurance cache levels?
Endurance caching is a plugin that sometimes comes auto installed with certain hosts. E.g. Bluehost or HostGator. It’s not bloatware or a bad thing, in fact it can be quite good at caching your website’s assets and speeding up the load time of your pages. Bluehost keeps a record of their endurance cache on github.
You can sent your cache level in Settings > General > At the bottom of the page
Which setting should you use on your site?
- Off (Level 0)
- Assets Only (Level 1)
- Normal (Level 2)
- Advanced (Level 3)
Off (Level 0) – this is self explanatory, it doesn’t engage in any of the Endurance caching. You might want to turn this off while developing and testing new features to make sure caching doesn’t interfere. Or you might want this permanently off as your caching is managed elsewhere.
Assets Only (level 1) – This means only javascript, stylesheets and images will be cached. This is refreshed automatically every hour.
Normal (Level 2) – Not only are all the level 1 assets cached, but the html code generated by php is also stored, so when a page is loaded, the static content is already generated. This is refreshed automatically every 24 hours.
Advanced (Level 3) – Not only is everything up to level 2 cached, but database caching can also be used. This is refreshed automatically every week. This is fine for static websites, but when using complex content generation such as Events Calendar or WooCommerce it could be best to exclude _wc_session_ from being cached or use Normal Level 2 caching.