How to Add Template Caching

It's easy to get distracted inside a template and forget about the cost of looking up data in a database. That's actually a benefit to using a framework like Django and a CMS like Wagtail: you don't have to worry about very much.

But as your website grows, the number of queries and amount of processing power your website needs will increase, and that will slow down your page load time. Django and Wagtail are already very conscious of this and work towards doing their best to keep your site fast and efficient. It's also easy to take advantage of the features we're given and make a terribly slow website. Admit it: we've all done it.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to enable template fragment caching, and in the video I'll teach you why caching is important and how it's beneficial, and how it can trick you into thinking there's a problem when it's really just cache being good at it's job.

There are many different types of caching. We're strictly looking at template fragment caching in this tutorial.

settings.py

Open your settings.py file. In this tutorial we used dev.py, but if you want caching to work in production simple paste this code into your production.py file.

Note: the LOCATION key value pair needs to be changed in the above code. Point it towards a directory called "cache" in your project. If you're unsure how to get your project location, follow these steps:

1. Open your terminal
2. cd into your project
3. type pwd

Template files

Next you'll need to identify heavy query areas of your website. Navigation/headers are usually good. StreamFields can be good too. Beautiful jumbotrons or hero areas with lots of custom content would be a good place to cache. Listing pages are good candidates for template fragment caching too.

On any template you want to use caching, make sure you load your cache tag. And then add a section you'd like to cache.

If you applied your caching correctly, this will cache loop cycle into its own .djcache file. This is useful for pagination. But you can cache outside of a for loop as well. For example, in the video I cached the entire navigation menu loop in base.html.

Deleting cache

You'll eventually need to delete your cache. In the video I demonstrated how caching gets in the way of updating your website's navbar. Open up your django shell and type the following command:

Not interested in watching a 25 minute video about template fragment caching? Or just need the code? No problem! Here's the link to the entire GitHub commit: https://github.com/CodingForEverybody/learn-wagtail/commit/2766e207c9db99af5ff7dc16b91477bd7b786a97