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What is Edge Caching?
Edge caching is the practice of storing copies of your site’s responses on a CDN’s edge servers so they can be served close to the visitor, instead of your origin server building them from scratch every time. The content delivery network is the hardware. The caching part is deciding what goes into it, and for how long.
Every cached response gets a lifespan, called its TTL (time to live). A product photo that never changes can sit at the edge for a year. A collection page showing live stock might get a few minutes. When the TTL runs out, the edge asks the origin for a fresh copy, and many CDNs keep handing out the old one while the new one loads in the background (a setting called stale-while-revalidate), so nobody waits on the refresh.
The math adds up fast. Say your homepage gets 10,000 visits an hour from one region and the edge keeps it for five minutes. Your origin builds that page 12 times an hour instead of 10,000.
What this means for revenue
Cached HTML is where most of the speed lives. The browser can’t start on images, fonts or scripts until the page itself arrives, so a page served from the edge pulls down Time to First Byte and gets Largest Contentful Paint moving sooner. That’s the first impression for every shopper landing from a Google result or a Meta ad you already paid for.
It also keeps you standing during spikes. Black Friday, a Klaviyo campaign to your whole list, a TikTok that suddenly takes off. If most of those requests are answered at the edge, the origin still has room for the work that can’t be cached, like cart updates and payments.
Get it wrong, though, and one shopper’s cart count or logged-in greeting shows up for the next person. So stores keep cart, checkout and account pages out of the edge cache and load the personal bits on product pages separately, after the page arrives. Most of the real work is drawing that line, template by template.
How Uxify helps
Reality tracks TTFB from real visitors and splits it by page, country and device, so you can spot where the cache isn’t pulling its weight. Its TTFB breakdown separates DNS, connection, TLS and server time, and a high server time on a page that should be cached usually means requests are slipping through to the origin. Vita watches your Core Web Vitals and flags the regression when a cache rule change makes things worse. And Navigation AI loads the next page in the background before the shopper taps, so the second click feels instant too.
Edge Caching FAQs
What’s the difference between edge caching and browser caching?
Browser caching keeps files on the shopper’s own phone or laptop, so it only helps that one person on their next page or visit. The edge keeps them on the CDN, where one visitor’s request warms the cache for everyone near that location, first-timers included.
Can I cache product pages if prices and stock change?
Usually, yes. Short TTLs plus a purge whenever a price or inventory update lands keep them accurate, and live stock badges or mini carts can load separately. Cart, checkout and account pages are the ones to leave out.
What’s a good cache hit ratio?
There’s no universal target. A store with thousands of filtered collection URLs will naturally miss more often than a ten-page brochure site, so your own trend in your CDN dashboard is the real benchmark. Static files should hit nearly every time. To check a single page, our edge server entry shows how to read the cache status header.