WordPress has a little secret, and that secret is that is can be a little “heavy”, as in taking a long time to load a page. Add in a handful of various plugins, and each page can take seconds to load. This makes for a slow web site and a poor user experience.
This isn’t really WordPress’s fault per se. It has a lot of things to do to generate a page: gather data from the database, assemble the HTML, and so on.On a shared hosting server, this can take a while.
Fortunately, most web pages, once written, remain fairly static. A plugin like WP Super Cache basically does the heavy lifting once, saves the content to a few files, and then retrieves those files when someone requests the page. This takes far less time than generating the page from scratch for each request.
Even for small sites, i recommend caching WordPress. It’s not the first plugin I add to a site, but I always have it installed for public-facing sites.
- Get it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/