How to Resolve Caching Issues

2 months ago
docsmaster
3 minutes

If you have a WordPress website, you more than likely using cache to help speed up the website for your visitors as well as saving bandwidth and server resources. However, caching can cause some strange issues when on your website when not configured correctly. Some of the issues you may encounter include:

  • Wrong information being displayed
  • Wrong information being saved into your database
  • Information not being saved
  • Inconsistent display of content when viewing from different devices/computers
  • Old information being displayed

This article hopes to make it easier to understand why the caching issues come up and how to resolve them.

What is caching?

Caching is a process where data is temporarily stored in a location that’s quicker to access, so it can be retrieved faster the next time it’s needed. The cached data typically includes the site’s static content, such as images, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.

Types of Caching

Browser Caching

This happens in your web browser (like Chrome, Firefox, etc.). When you visit a website, the browser saves certain parts of the site, such as images, styles, and scripts, on your device. This gives the browser the ability to skip downloading those assets again the next time a visitor is on the site.

Page Caching

In this type of caching, entire pages of a website are stored for a period of time. This is usually done on the server side on your WordPress installation with plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed Cache

Object Caching

This type of caching stores smaller pieces of data or objects, like database query results or API responses, in memory for quick access.  Instead of saving a snapshot of the whole page, object caching saves the way the page was requested from the server. This allows the cache to skip creating the database querying process and instead serves the query results directly on subsequent page loads.

What do I do about my caching issues?

Most caching issues can be resolved by simply excluding all your monetization pages from page caching in your WordPress caching plugin. If you are using CDN’s like Cloudflare, you may also have to exclude the pages from your CDN’S dashboard. For ChamaWP, we recommend excluding the following pages:

  • Donation page: example.com/donate/
  • Membership page: example.com/mebership/
  • Crowdfunding page: example.com/crowdfunding/
  • Commissions page: example.com/commissions/
  • Account page: example.com/account
  • Payment page: example.com/payment/
  • Payment confirmation page: example.com/payment-confirmation/
  • Subscription page: example.com/subscription/
  • Subscription confirmation page: example.com/subscription-confirmation/