How can we clear (purge) the various caches on our website?

ANSWER: Because we deploy SlickStack for all our managed hosting clients, there are multiple caching technologies that your team should be aware of. While this might be slightly different from other web hosts you are used to, thankfully SlickStack uses industry standard caches and refrains from “rebranding” them to sound fancy (like many hosts do). In other words, your developer will have a much easier time understanding these cache applications because there is significant public documentation available for all of them.

1. CloudFlare. Firstly, since all domains in our system are behind CloudFlare, that is the most important cache you should know about because its not “on” your server, but rather managed by CloudFlare. In order to clear (temporarily disable) the CloudFlare cache, please visit the CloudFlare plugin in your WordPress backend and enable “dev mode” while your developers are updating your site. Keep in mind that “dev mode” will automatically shut off after an hour or two so you will need to re-enable it during long periods of live design updates.

https://www.example.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=cloudflare

2. Nginx (FastCGI) Cache. To clear Nginx FastCGI Cache, load this URL pattern and click “purge cache”:

https://www.example.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=nginx-cache

Ensure path is /var/www/cache

3. Opcache. which is a cool new technology built into PHP itself. Opcache is installed at the server level, and cannot be disabled. However, it will automatically “purge” files every few minutes (the Opcache only caches the PHP code within PHP files, and not “page content” created in WordPress, etc). If you wish to purge the entire Opcache manually you can use a free WordPress plugin such as Opcache Dashboard, which we install to all our clients websites, and click the Invalidate button to purge the Opcache. Or, just wait a few minutes and you will see the PHP code updated on the frontend of your website (making sure that CloudFlare is in “dev” mode of course and that Comet Cache is Inactive or manually cleared).

4. Redis object cache plugin, which automagically caches certain database queries to MySQL. Because WordPress intelligently integrates now with object caching, there is often nothing you need to do to clear Redis. However, after any major changes its always a good idea to clear this and any other cache just to be sure that old data is not being presented.

Ultimately caching is the future of web performance and we are happy to be one of the only WordPress hosting companies that offers management of all these of these cache options which can provide huge boosts to your site performance and SEO rankings over time.

Related content:

• Overview of CloudFlare ‘Dev’ Mode For WordPress