Website Caching and How to Clear Your Website’s Cache(s)

What is Caching

Caching helps your website load faster and saves work on the web server by storing and re-serving the previously-generated responses for duplicative requests.

While this doesn’t typically cause issues in regular use, it can be a problem when you are actively modifying a website, or when a website you access frequently has very recently changed. In these situations you may not always see the updated content immediately. Occasionally, content caching can cause even cause websites to appear incorrectly, particularly when CSS or JavaScript files have been modified and the older versions are cached.

Caching on the Mason WordPress Platform

When a user requests a web page from your Mason WordPress platform website, there are three places where your website content could be cached:

at the web host (WPEngine),
at the web application firewall (Sucuri),
in the web browser

Clearing Your Caches

Here are the steps to clear your website caches:

Step 0: Log In to WordPress

First, you’ll need to log-in to your WordPress instance in order to access the controls to clear the caches.

Step 1: Clear the Web Host Cache (WPEngine)

Your old website content may be cached at the web host. We have to clear the cache there first, since this is the original source of your website content.

In the WordPress Dashboard, click on the WPEngine link in the left sidebar. (It is the first link in the left sidebar.)
In the main area of this page, click the Caching tab at the top.
Under the Quick Actions section, click the Clear all caches button.

Step 2: Clear the Web Application Firewall Cache (Sucuri)

Requests for your website first pass through our Web Application Firewall, where it may be cached as well. Now that the web host cache has been cleared, we need to clear the firewall cache also.

In the WordPress Dashboard, click on the Mason Sucuri Integration link in the left sidebar. (It is usually the third link in the left sidebar.)
On this page, click the Clear Cache Now button. A new tab will open that will confirm that the cache has been cleared. Close this new tab.
(If you don’t have this link in the dashboard sidebar, or you don’t see the Clear Cache Now button, contact us and we’ll set it up for you.)

Step 3: Clear Your Web Browser Cache

Your individual web browser may still have old content cached as well. Therefore we want to clear this too.

Chrome and Firefox

In your web browser, hit F12 to open up the developer tools panel.
In the developer tools panel, select the Network tab at the top.
At the top of the network tab, check the box for disable cache.
While leaving the developer tools panel open, refresh the page. This will force your browser to re-download any cached content.

Now you should see the most up-to-date content on your website.