Edge caching is a content delivery strategy where web assets — including HTML pages, images, CSS, and JavaScript — are cached on servers distributed geographically around the world (called edge nodes or Points of Presence), so visitors receive content from a node physically close to them rather than waiting for a round trip to the origin server. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) like Cloudflare, Fastly, or AWS CloudFront handles edge caching. The latency benefit is significant: a visitor in Tokyo requesting content from a New York origin server faces approximately 150ms of one-way network latency; with edge caching, the same visitor gets the cached response from a Tokyo PoP in roughly 5ms. WordPress integrations like Cloudflare's APO (Automatic Platform Optimization) extend edge caching to full HTML pages — not just static assets — by serving cached versions to anonymous visitors while bypassing the cache for logged-in users and shopping cart sessions.
Glossary entry
