No matter your website’s goals, speed and efficiency are key. The bottom line is that you want your website to be fast and accessible for visitors, no matter where they are in the world.

WordPress.com’s Global Edge Cache (pronounced like “cash”) makes your site load faster for visitors around the world by taking advantage of our global network of data centers. This feature is always enabled on Free, Personal, and Premium sites. For our Business and Commerce sites, you can now manage the Global Edge Cache settings from the “Hosting Configuration” page.

Say your website is hosted at one of our data centers in Amsterdam and a visitor from Cape Town wants to access it. The request from the visitor has to travel halfway around the world and back again to be fulfilled—that is, load the site on their device. 

Through some backend technical wizardry, our Global Edge Cache means that the request only needs to travel to Johannesburg and back, saving your visitor tens or even hundreds of milliseconds. It may not seem like much, but when you’re online, every millisecond counts. 

In short, enabling this caching feature brings your content closer to your visitors, wherever they might be. This means faster load times, less waiting, and a better overall experience. And as we all know, a happy visitor is more likely to become a loyal customer or follower.

The WordPress.com Global Edge Cache is always enabled for sites on Free, Personal, and Premium plans. On a Business or Commerce site, you can enable Global Edge Cache from the Hosting Configuration page.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. From your dashboard, go to Settings → Hosting Configuration.
2. Scroll down to the “Cache” module.
3. Click the toggle for  “Enable global edge caching for faster content delivery.”

Once you click that toggle, you’re all set! 

Many hosts charge extra for this kind of edge caching, or require integration with a third-party provider. On WordPress.com, global edge caching is included on every plan, without any bandwidth restrictions.

This is just one more reason why WordPress.com stands out as the premier managed WordPress host. Be it staging sites, SSH and WP-CLI access, or unified site management, we’re always working on new tools to make WordPress.com an essential component of your development workflow. 

What other features would you like to see? How can we make WordPress.com an even more powerful place to build a website? Feel free to leave a comment or contact our friendly support team. And be sure to follow our develop blog to stay up-to-date with everything we’re doing to make your behind-the-scenes experience even better.