That’s right I am talking about caching and more specifically browser caching. We all know that in order to meet the aggressive page load times necessary to maintain search ranking we must employ various methods of caching. You also know that from my talk about High Performance WordPress I am no stranger to caching.
This issue almost always affect continuous delivery of product updates and system migrations. If I had a dollar for every time I heard on a standup or other status meeting call something like, “It’s a caching problem…” I would have a hell of a lot of cash.
So how do we address the elephant in this room?
The next is to investigate utilizing a cache purge tool in the WordPress CMS. This option is dependent upon the caching plugin and underlying caching system you are using.
If you are using a CDN of course you may eventually need to purge items out of cache on a URL by URL basis or even more battle axe style using an across site cache purge.
This of course leads us to browser caching which is probably the most temperamental beast. This is because neither you as the developer nor the site owner have control over you visitors browser configurations. Honestly you don’t even have control over which browser or even version they use. Thankfully you are able to design to the most prevalent browsers based on your analytics data.
For Firefox and Chrome we have some nice add-on/extensions that add a single click browser cache clear button.
Now you know the many ways you can clear the cache and more importantly how to communicate to your non-developer staff as well as users how to do the same for their browsers.