7. Your site’s speed

Your website is tuned continuously so pages arrive fast. Almost all of this is invisible, but one part of it will occasionally confuse you, so it is worth understanding.

7.1 What caching means

Rather than rebuilding your page every time somebody asks for it, the site keeps a ready-made copy and hands that out. It is the single biggest reason a site feels quick.

7.2 Why your edit “did not save”

Here is the part that catches people out. You change a page, look at your site, and see the old version. Nothing has gone wrong — you are being shown the ready-made copy, which has not caught up yet.

Try these in order:

1. Hard refresh the page. Ctrl + F5 on Windows, Cmd + Shift + R on a Mac.
2. Try a private or incognito window. If the change is there, the page is fine and your own browser was holding the old copy.
3. Wait a few minutes and look again.

If it still shows the old version after all three, tell us — we can clear the stored copies instantly from our side.

7.3 What is yours to do

Nothing routine. The one habit that helps is the image advice: large uncompressed photos are the most common cause of a page slowing down, and that is something you control at upload time.

7.4 What to leave alone

Do not change caching or performance settings, and do not add another speed plugin. Two caching systems fighting each other is a genuinely difficult problem to unpick, and it usually shows up as pages that will not update.

7.5 If the site feels slow

Tell us, and include what you were doing, roughly when, and on what — phone or computer, home or office. Slowness is often specific to one page or one connection, and those details are what let us find it rather than guess.