WordPress has a few built-in ways to cache data that enable rapid development. Understanding your options and how to use them properly in your context is crucial to a performant and scalable site. The Transients API provides a powerful and easy way to store data with an expiration, and it comes with a few under-the-hood perks as well.

Join me in looking at the benefits you can gain from understanding and implementing “transients”. When we’re done, you’ll know what this API is, when it should be used, how to use it, and how to scale it. I’ll give real, useful code examples that you can implement immediately—without boring you to death. You’ll be able to do anything from caching data from a external API (like recent tweets) to storing a large, complex query.

We’ll also cover some of the more obscure aspects of this method, like: -Object caching/Memcached -Autoloading -Race Conditions -Expired transient cleanup -Options table bloat

Do yourself and your visitors a favor by utilizing the Transients API. And, as you’ll see in this session, knowing how to use it will make all WordPress’s caching techniques easy to implement.