Overview
Modern Retail uses a plugin called W3 Total Cache to improve the performance of your WordPress website. W3 Total Cache is brilliant because it works in the background speeding up your site by "caching" the most frequently used pages on your site. Pages and pages can be written about caching, but suffice it to say, it speeds up your site by holding web pages in memory instead of retrieving them from disk, which is super fast.
Caching Problems
Most people will never think about W3 Total Cache, and frankly most don't even know it exists. It quietly sits in the background doing its thing to speed up the pages on your website. However, it can become a problem when you update a page in your website and it doesn't immediately show up online. The timing of when your new changes show up will vary from a few minutes to hours, and sometimes in this immediate world, that's just too long. Luckily, there's an easy solution - read on.
Clearing the Cache
Clearing the W3 Total Cache is easy, and it involves 2 simple steps after you've logged into WordPress.
- Click Performance in the menu on the left.
- Click empty all caches.
You'll notice a brief pause while W3 clears the caches, and then it will be done.
A quick note about the shopping cache on your website. W3 Total Cache has nothing to do with the shopping pages on your website. Depending on which e-commerce platform you are using (Magento, etc.), clearing the caches for shopping is different. W3 Total Cache is only responsible for the content on your website, and not shopping.