What is Cache?
Caching is the process of saving temporary files on our websites to make SourceLink software load quickly for your website visitors. Enabling cache is considered an online best practice and ensures that visitors have the highest quality experience. It’s also important as a factor for how your website will perform for search engine optimization purposes.
Unfortunately, turning on cache can sometimes make it difficult for administrators to see changes that have been made, since old versions can continue to show even after approving or publishing updates. This issue can be seen with button colors, image quality changes, most major website template updates, The Resource Navigator® profile changes, and sometimes with events.
Additionally, and importantly, your website may appear to load much more slowly for you as an administrator because we turn off caching when we determine that you are logged in to one of SourceLink’s SiteConnex websites.
How does caching work on SourceLink?
Generally, when you are logged in to your SourceLink SiteConnex website, we attempt to turn off caching for just your account. This means that caching issues should not be a problem for you to see modifications to your website, but again, the website may load slower for you than the public.
You can validate if a cache issue is happening by reloading your updated web page in an incognito browser / enabling in-private browsing mode to see if updates are showing correctly there or a page, feature, etc. loads much faster. It should. If you see an expected change on the incognito or in-private browser window, but not the browser you used to make the edit, then the issue is likely due to caching.
There is one other important cache rule to be aware of with our SourceLink SiteConnex plugin. New Resource Navigator profiles and updates to Resource Navigator profiles are cached (saved) for every 24 hour period, and cleared around midnight central time every night. This means that updates to The Resource Navigator via SourceLink Basic/Pro/Enterprise can take up to 24 hours to show up on the public website, unless you manually clear the SourceLink plugin cache by following the steps below.
Clearing the SourceLink SiteConnex website cache
Please follow the steps below to see the latest content, including The Resource Navigator, on your SourceLink website:
- Log in to your SourceLink SiteConnex website
- Mouse over SourceLink from the left menu, and select Settings
- Select the API Cache tab from the top of the menu
- Click the Flush API Cache blue button
- Last line of text on this page should confirm current date and time of the last clear
Here is additional information about how caching works on SourceLink SiteConnex hosting. SourceLink SiteConnex does not cache most aspects of The Events Calendar, as there have been issues with caching causing problems during event submissions.