Nobody reads documentation from the beginning. They search, land in the middle, and decide within seconds whether the answer is here — which makes search the product and the page merely where it lands.
Documentation traffic is anonymous, repetitive and search-first, which makes it unusually cheap to serve well.
In-site search is the primary navigation, so it is indexed rather than run as a database LIKE across every post. Results arrive while somebody is still typing.
Documentation changes rarely and is read constantly by anonymous visitors, which is the ideal case for full-page caching. Almost every request is answered at the edge.
People run last year's release and need last year's documentation. Older versions stay published and cached rather than being something you delete to keep the site tidy.
Restructuring a documentation set is a big change. Clone the site, reorganise there, and push it back once the new structure is right.
Updating a page purges that page. There is no rebuild step and no deploy queue, so a correction is live in seconds.
Almost all documentation traffic arrives from a search engine or a search box, deep in the middle. Everything about the site should assume the reader has no context.
Documentation is the friendliest workload there is: anonymous, repetitive, and changing far less often than it is read.
This workload asks for very little, and the little it asks for is unusual: search that behaves like a product feature rather than a WordPress afterthought.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Site search | Indexed rather than run as a live database query | Search is the primary navigation here, and WordPress's default search is a pattern match across post content that gets slower with every page added. |
| Page cache TTL | Long, with purge on edit | Documentation changes far less often than it is read, so long cache lifetimes cost nothing and a targeted purge handles corrections. |
| Archived versions | Kept published and cached | Readers running an older release need the documentation that matches it, and unpublishing it turns their search result into a 404. |
| Anchor-heavy pages | Served whole rather than paginated | Deep links into a section are how documentation is shared, and splitting a long page breaks every link anyone has saved. |
| Asset caching | Long expiry on code-highlighting and diagram assets | Documentation ships the same handful of static assets on every page, and re-fetching them is pure waste. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the documentation across — migration is free, every version included.