Caching of your site tends to create a superior user experience as pages are served to your site visitors more quickly. In the modern technological world of “NOW!”, where we expect our requests from technology to delivery immediately, anything that takes longer than a few seconds to deliver what the user asked for is considered slow, useless, or obsolete.
Caching of live WordPress sites is something that used to be a rare occurence. With more informative articles, better hosting companies, and the user community “leveling up” their technical expertise, caching of WordPress sites has become more commonplace than ever before. That is a good thing.
Many other web presence services and hosting companies have deployed caching for years. Some are more advanced than others with their deployment process. The better web presence platforms will manage flushing the cache for you.
If you are managing your own hosting and caching solutions here are some things we’ve encountered on our own WordPress sites and MySLP deployments.
Security or Proxy Service Caches
A security or proxy service is a “website request agent” that sits between your site and the real world. It is like the bouncer that only lets the “good people” gain access to your site. Many, like Sucuri, also have performance options built in. These “performance” settings are a proxy cache. They store a copy of the non-dynamic pieces of a website like CSS and sometimes JavaScript on their servers and send those resources from that copy.
That means you will need to clear these third party caches any time you update your site with something that changes the CSS or JavaScript. Some caching services are more aggressive than others and cache ALL JavaScript files and CSS files. Some are great at detecting file changes immediately while others could take an hour, day, or even a week to detect the changes.
