How to Clear WordPress Cache?

 Many factors influence the performance of your website, including design, platform, and how you optimize its various elements.

Thus, one of the most important ways to improve website performance is through site caching. Almost every WordPress site has caching enabled to efficiently store resources and speed up the site.

So, if you have a large website with a lot of visitors, caching can be a very useful tool for optimizing page load times.

It is often seen that changes made to your WordPress site are not immediately visible to the end-users. The reason for this is that WordPress continues to display the cached version of your posts and pages. This issue, however, can be resolved in a short time.

Simply clearing the cache will delete the stored and static versions of your pages and force the WordPress plugin to store the refreshed pages.

So, in this guide, we’ll go over why it is necessary to clear the WordPress cache and how to clear it with the help of some plugins?

Before we go any further, let us see what WordPress cache is and how it works?

What is WordPress Cache?

Caching decreases the amount of work required to produce a webpage for viewing. Thus, it is the way of growing performance.

So, if the website is receiving a high volume of traffic, you can enable WordPress caching with the help of some plugins, which we will discuss in the latter part of this blog.

There are numerous benefits of WordPress caching including, increased website speed, improved search engine ranking, and the conservation of some of the server resources, and so on…
Although WordPress caching brings a lot of advantages, however, there is a need to clear such cache because of a variety of reasons, which we will discuss below.

How does Cache Works in WordPress?

When a user visits your website:

• A request is sent to your server to display the webpage

• Then, the server obtains the necessary data.

• The data is then sent to the user’s browser as an HTML file which is then processed by the browser, which converts it and displays it as a webpage.

However, if the user revisits your website, the entire process will have to be repeated. Thus, to avoid such a case, we need a cache.

Let’s now discuss why it is necessary to remove such cache.

Why should you clear your WordPress cache?

When you publish a new post or make a change to your content, the caching system automatically deletes any outdated or expired cached versions.

However, sometimes, your caching system may fail to recognize changes and continue to display the old, static, and cached versions.

The conflict between the cached version and the updates may cause your website to malfunction.

As a result, there is a necessity to delete your WordPress cache.

Moreover, few instances of common scenarios in which such issue occurs, are listed below:

• Updation of WordPress theme or plugins.

• If you have changed your website’s design elements and made changes to your content.

• Moved your website to a new host.

• Relocated the WordPress site to the root directory.

• Started using a plugin to compress images.

As we are now familiar with WordPress cache, let us now look at the step-by-step guide for removing cache from your WordPress using plugins, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

Step-by-Step Guide to Clear Cache

Installing plugins (W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache) is the simplest way to clear cache in WordPress websites. Let’s get started now:

Clearing cache with WP Super Cache

• Login into your WordPress dashboard

• Next, in the left side-bar, navigate to Settings

• Under settings, press on WP Super cache

• In the WP super cache, scroll down below to click on the Delete Cache button.

Note: We have already written a brief step-by-step guide on how to install WordPress. You can go through our blog category on our official website.

Clearing cache with W3 Total Cache

After installing the plugin, you have to follow the below steps to clear the cache.

• Login to your WordPress panel

• In the left sidebar, click on Performance -> Dashboard

• Next, at the top of the page, click the empty all caches button

• Thus, your WordPress cache will be cleared by the system. When it’s finished you will see the below message.

Conclusion

It is crucial to enable caching on your site and manually clear cache regularly.

However, you can improve your website's performance and get the most out of it by using popular WordPress Cache Plugins such as WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache.

In addition, you must be very much cautious, when dealing with cache in WordPress.

A minor error can cause your website to crash or might delete important files. However, it’s advisable to have a backup of your site.

Source:https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/wordpress/229/how-to-clear-wordpress-cache