The Transients API provides a great tool for caching data that needs to be refreshed regularly. In most cases it makes it easy for developers to improve the performance of their themes/plugins, yet there are situations which display weaknesses in the Transients API. When your transient is storing external data, like news from the BBC News API, the HTTP request required to refresh the data can significantly delay the page rendering. We are going to go through an example of how we can get around this weakness and refresh our transient without delaying the page rendering. Does it really matter? […]