In reply to Steve Morton.

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your feedback about caching.

There have been long periods where WP Super Cache hasn't been maintained, W3TC was broken or WP Rocket (paid) was missing key features. Satollo's Hyper Cache version upgrade from v2 to v3 more or less entirely broke the plugin (I included a link but it's not accepted - try searching for "WordPress Caching Drag Race" for the details).

This is all anything but a smooth experience for the end user.

When I mentioned caching in passing, I didn't mean that WordPress core should write caching for all contexts and all levels but just that there should be effective PHP caching which would run efficiently on shared hosting and smaller VPS out of the box.

The core caching could be written in such a way that it can be enhanced or overridden by developers running a Varnish static file cache fed by Nginx microcaching and with a custom implementation of Memcached. Some developers like that don't even use a caching plugin. All the caching is done in open source server level tools.

Using that tiny minority (which includes WordPress.com, Pantheon.com, WP Engine and Flywheel for instance) to fail to provide a rock solid core caching system is a kind of tedious sophistry.

"Move to a better host" when it means the host is charging at least $50/month for less than 100,000 visits is just another example of how we are crippling WordPress deliberately in order to be able to vacuum more money out of users pockets in upgraded hosting, upgrades plugins and frivolous maintenance contracts. These external bolt on solutions from hosts aren't necessarily even all that good. For instance, while highly efficient both the WPE and Flywheel caching tools are incredibly fragile and work only for sites with mainly non-logged in visitors. For membership sites or ecommerce usually you have to roll your own.

The basics like caching should work out of the box.

There's more than enough talent in WordPress.org with thousands of volunteers and incredibly talented programmers to have caching - for instance - solved in two weeks. Why must millions of end users bearing the cost for manually tinkering and experimenting with half-baked or poorly maintained caching solutions?