Is it possible to save an entire piece of rendered HTML in a transient?

Question

I have some query that brings around 50+ posts (I know it's not ideal but had to do that to build something the client asked..) and a set of loops to order them in a certain way and it looks like that this sequence is delaying parts of the rendering of the page.

I'd like to cache in a transient this entire block of rendered HTML, is that possible?

Answer 1

Transients API documentation formulates suggested usage as:

long/expensive database queries or complex processed data

Your case seems like a perfect fit for this description. On technical side you will need to concatenate your output into variable and put into transient, instead of displaying it.

Answer 2

If I were to implement this today, my preference would be the memcache object cache, storing the data using wp_cache_set(), possibly updating the data using WP_Cron rather than during page load.

Just how many kilobytes are we talking about?