[basilgohar]

In my experience, the caching of WordPress became essential on shared hosting which one of my clients was somewhat bound to for....reasons. Without, each page load was atrociously slow, but once enabled and the cached was warmed, the site moved as quickly as anywhere else.

It's interesting because a custom legacy PHP application on the same shared host didn't demonstrate such slowness, but I did write some aggressive in-request caching (static variables for repeatedly called functions, mainly) to great performance effect.