Although transients are intended as a speed-boosting feature in WordPress, sometimes they can linger longer than you would like. Here are some tips on how to take control of them without eliminating important features.
The Basics
The main benefit of the Transients API is that rather than having to serve information from multiple sources every time a visitor loads a page, you can instead store relevant information on your site’s database for a limited time. Regular automatic refreshing helps to keep this up to date while your page load speed is preserved.
The most obvious example of transients at work is found with popular social media plug-ins. They will effectively cache interactions from your social accounts and make them available on your WP site, encouraging sharing without compromising performance.
Web browsers are regularly enhanced to make pages load faster. But without taking action and ensuring site-side optimisations are implemented, search rank can suffer.
The Catch
Transients sound great, but there are some problems that can arise that make manual management important.
A plug-in may be displaying incorrect information, which might have a negative impact on a page’s sharability or bounce rate. This will make clearing the transient and updating your data base sooner rather than later a priority.
Transients can also expire if a plug-in is removed or goes dormant for whatever reason, leaving a lingering trace on your database. Whatever the case, you may be frustrated with the way that your WP platform is behaving and require a fast effective way of addressing this issue head-on.
The Solution
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the way to make transients easier to manage is to install another WP plug-in designed to achieve just that.
There are multiple options, with WebAware’s Delete Expired Transients being one of the more popular options around. This will give you an overview of all of the transients which are active at the moment and allow you to eliminate them individually or in bulk, depending on your requirements.
Of course, if you are not interested in tinkering with your site’s inner workings yourself, you could always contact an agency like https://happy2host.com, which offers WordPress web design in London.
Expert assistance can be affordable and make your site run more smoothly in less time, which is immensely valuable in an age of increasingly discerning visitors.