The author of the text started building websites without focusing on performance, assuming it was a luxury for later stages of development. However, they soon realized the importance of caching and its impact on SEO, user experience, and revenue. The author implemented a basic page caching system and learned that while it worked well, it was only one tool in a larger solution. They explored how to cache database queries using Redis, which can significantly speed up their site by reducing the time spent accessing data from the database. By storing cached query results in Redis, they can reduce the number of database queries and improve performance, leading to faster page loads and increased user engagement.