Blog Posts Take Forever to Update

Do you use a caching plugin? If so, it could be caching your feed.

We do- we’re using W3 Total Cache. Any suggestions as to how I can get it to exclude caching the news feed?

I don’t use W3 Total Cache as I prefer another one. However, the documentation for W3 indications there’s an option to specify pages to exclude from caching. look for: “Never cache the following pages”

I’m not sure I want to disable that page caching actually since that will slow the home page’s load time. I’m a bit new to this – can I just manually hit “empty page cache” in the cache settings to get everything to post at that time in my news feed?

I think I’ve misunderstood your issue. I thought you were describing problems with your feed and not your home page.

So you’re saying that the issue is with what appears on the home page? That is, new posts don’t appear on the homepage right away?

Isn’t that the same thing? There is a feed on my home page of the news posts.

WordPress has RSS (and other formats) feeds which are often referred to as feeds. These are typically accessed by RSS feed readers rather than browsers. The feed for your homepage is accessed by appending /feed/ to the end of the URL.

You can turn caching off for your “/feed/” while leaving caching turned on for your home page “/”.

So how do I turn off the caching for just the feed? In the settings I found this:
Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments
Even if using a feed proxy service (like FeedBurner), enabling this option is still recommended.

But it isn’t checked off so presumably the feeds*aren’t* being cached right now.

Try accessing your feed with a browser. Then find your browser’s view source option and scroll to the bottom. Do you see any text at the bottom indicating if it’s being cached? There’s typically a line or two of text indicating the cache status and date.

It does say:
<!– Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: https://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Page Caching using disk: enhanced (User is logged in)
Database Caching using disk (Request-wide User is logged in)
Object Caching 1989/2122 objects using disk

OK. So another trick to be aware of… Based on your settings and what I’m reading above, the plugin may behave differently for those that are logged in like you vs. everyone else. You need to do the same thing, but either logout first or if you’re using Chrome open an incongnito window so you’re treated as anonymous user.

You’re allowed to share your site’s URL on these forums if that’s something you’d like to do.

Oh- our URL is belsnj.org

It actually loads just fine when I’m logged in to WP as the admin but when I check it out in another browser (FF) where I’m not logged in that’s where the problem is with the loading.

That’s what I would expect actually and suggests that caching is the problem.

Caching plugins typically don’t cache for logged in users particularly administrators. This way you’re always viewing the latest version of content. Everyone else gets a cached version until the plugin “decides” to update the cache.

So if things work perfectly when logged in, but otherwise don’t I’m guessing the issue has to do with the settings for W3 Total Cache. I’d still try the setting I mentioned to exclude the feed URL. But otherwise, because I use a different caching plugin, I can’t provide more specific help.

So I just noticed there’s a setting for:
“Cache posts page
For many blogs this is your most visited page, it is recommended that you cache it.”
I suppose this one should be the post feed then, right?

Isn’t it better to just manually clear the cache each time there’s a new post then to disable the post from caching?