APO purge issue

[user15825]

I’ve had great experience with APO. It’s made my site super fast with positive feedback from users.

However I’ve got a strange problem today. One page (this one) won’t purge, manually or automatically.

I can’t figure out why. I don’t use any caching plugin and my theme doesn’t either. All other pages purge when updated but this one refuses to.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[user2961]

same thing here, one of my sites not purging and not showing new content anymore

This happens every few months and it alwys takes ages to solve so I hope cloudflare looks into this faster than the before.

[user15825]

Without me doing anything, it appears to have updated the cache and the new page is being served. Would be good to know if cf did something.

[cbrandt]

Please see this answer to a similar topic for reference. In your case, you’d need to create a rule based on URI Path instead of User Agent.

APO not flushing cache on Mobile

Issues with caching such as the one you’re facing are very difficult to troubleshoot, and they normally go away just like they appeared in the first time: by itself. However, it’s frustrating to have to wait. Here’s a workaround you may want to try and adjust for your needs. It’s meant to be used temporarily, so you need to disable the rule every now and then and purge cache, see if APO is working as expected again. Create a Cache Rule in the Modify URL category. When incoming requests mat…

[user15825]

Annoyingly, Cloudflare is once again serving an older version of this page. Users are again complaining that they’re seeing an older version. Bizarre that it served the newer page for a day.

[cbrandt]

Has the content of the page changed since it’s publication date of July 16? Or has any newer comment been made since the one on the cached page, from July 28?

Or has the newer page only changed contents in the Latest Posts widget (LPW) panel on the right of the page, as new posts have been published but are not showing there?

If the latter, there’s actually a limitation in APO for WordPress in handling pages with LPW and similar widgets. The content in that case is only updated dynamically when a new request arrives at the origin. That page hasn’t been saved anew just because some new post was published elsewhere, and therefore the trigger that would have made Cloudflare plugin request purging the cache was not triggered. Currently, the only workaround I know, which I’ve extensively tested, is to 1) make sure your origin sets the “Last-Modified” header properly; and 2) create Cache Rules for requests to every page with a LPW. I’ve described this in detail in an answer to a related post:

Website not updating automatically when new posts are added

Hi, I’ve been testing the issue you’re facing, and the issue seems to be related to both how APO handles cache invalidation, and how WordPress tells visitors that content has changed. When you update a post, this post is updated on WordPress database and the “Last-Modified” header is updated accordingly. That is a signal for browsers to request the new version, instead of using the one it has on cache. WordPress is known for messing up with the Last-Modified header, which is understandable, s…

Alternatively, of course, you can always open each of the posts with LPW, make minor editing (adding or removing a space character, for example) and saving the post. You’d need to do this every time a new post is published on your site, so you may want to create a script to do this automatically.

[user15825]

Thank you for the information. I’ll have to dig into this when I have a bit more time. It’s disappointing that CF seems to be having this issue when it used to work in the past. I even tried to change some content in the page and it still won’t refresh in the cache.

[user15825]

Putting aside any auto purging, what am I doing wrong that prevents CF from showing a new version of a page when a manual purge is completed via the CF panel? The only way I’m getting the new page served is via purging the whole site (also via CF panel).

[cbrandt]

@user15825

what am I doing wrong

I don’t know.

Cache is a complex matter in and by itself, with several headers combining to tell different browsers what to cache, what not to cache, if and when to purge or revalidate etc.

Then there’s the complexity of Cloudflare many caching layers (APO, but also Page Rules, Cache Rules, Cache settings, Smart Edge Revalidation, Tiered Cache, etc.), as well as the many layers where your origin could be handling/mis-handling cache (server config, Varnish or other server-level caching, WordPress core, WordPress theme, WordPress caching plugins, WordPress performance plugins, or any other WordPress plugin for that matter), and you realize it’s a big challenge to find out the definite source of any cache-related trouble.

That’s also the reason why I don’t quite buy the idea that “me too, I’m having the same issue” kind of attitude when it comes to caching. Though understandable — as when you have such a big pool of users as Cloudflare has, you’re bound to have many users seeing what appears to be the same problem — when you start sorting things out the similar issues may turn out to be coincidental results of different settings.