Get multiple posts with some custom fields efficient

Question

Is there an efficient way to get some posts with (some of) their custom fields in one go?

I have a custom post with some custom fields and would like to create an overview page where I display all posts in their respective category. I need the custom fields because there is info about how to display the posts in this overview (icon location, alt text etc.)

I don't want to just get a list of posts and then get the custom fields for every single one of them using a loop producing a ton of queries.

I know I can cache the result until a post changes but it would be nice if it wasn't necessary at all.

So is there a way to get posts with their custom fields or at least a way to get the custom fields of several posts at once or do I have to write my own query to achieve that?

Answer 1

Meta fields are heavily cached. Depending on your configuration and specific query, it is likely that WP_Query calls update_post_caches() which trickles down to update_meta_cache() for queried posts.

Most of the time you don't need to worry about this, until you determine that it is real bottleneck in some way (like profiling code).