WP Engine Announces Revolutionary Technology That Lets Company Spend Less Money While Customers Feel Grateful
Hosting provider says automatically enabling edge caching will dramatically reduce server workload, improve website speed, and—through an unrelated miracle—protect quarterly margins.
AUSTIN, TX — Describing the change as an exciting investment in customer success, WP Engine announced Monday that it will soon enable edge full-page caching by default, allowing customers’ websites to load faster while requiring WP Engine’s actual servers to do substantially less work.
“Your visitors deserve content delivered from the nearest possible location,” read an email from the hosting company, carefully avoiding the phrase “because we would prefer they never reach our expensive infrastructure at all.”
The new system will store copies of webpages at edge locations around the world, dramatically reducing the number of requests that must travel back to the servers customers believed they were paying WP Engine to operate.
According to the company, time to first byte may improve by as much as 90%, while the amount of computing power WP Engine needs to provide may improve by a figure executives described as “please stop asking.”
“This is entirely about performance,” said fictional WP Engine Senior Vice President of Reframing Cost Reductions as Premium Features, Carson Metcalf. “The fact that we can serve 40,000 visitors the same cached HTML file instead of repeatedly generating it from your WordPress installation is merely an incredible coincidence that our finance department has been celebrating for six straight weeks.”
WP Engine emphasized that the feature will work alongside its existing layers of page caching, object caching, CDN caching, browser caching, and whatever additional caching layer is necessary to ensure customers’ websites never make direct contact with the server they rent.
“Think of your website as a restaurant,” Metcalf explained. “Previously, every customer ordered a meal from the kitchen. Under our improved system, we prepare one sandwich Monday morning, place copies of it at airports across North America, and charge you more because everyone received it very quickly.”
Customers were reassured that highly optimized websites would experience the greatest benefits, particularly sites with minimized JavaScript, static content, few logged-in users, no complicated personalization, and essentially no reason to be hosted on an expensive managed WordPress platform in the first place.
The company also confirmed that EFPC would be enabled automatically in August, continuing the technology-industry tradition of describing a mandatory platform change as something users have enthusiastically chosen.
“You can manage this setting within the user portal at any time,” the email noted, meaning customers remain completely free to disable the cost-saving feature until the next support representative tells them turning it back on is required before WP Engine will investigate their performance issue.
At press time, WP Engine support was patiently explaining that a customer’s outdated webpage was not technically broken because it was being delivered incorrectly at exceptional speed from 47 global locations.