Breeze causing problems even when disabled

So here’s the thing (and keep in mind that I’m a Cloudways customer).

I tried Breeze for some time, was happy with it. But then I noticed that sometimes it caused strange problems and some timeouts in admin screens. Also, minifying is sometimes tricky and usually won’t work at all on Woocommerce sites.

I figured, this is too much trouble for little return, so I disabled it on some of my sites and noticed that they were actually a bit faster. Maybe a caching plugin wasn’t needed at all. And with this I proceeded to disable Breeze on my 60+ sites.

And ever since everything was running smoothly – until today. A few days ago one of my customers asked to change some text in his website, which I promptly did using Elementor. Today he calls me very angrily asking why the changes weren’t up. I fired up the website, and there they are. And now I couldn’t figure out why I was seeing the changes and he was not.

After some hours of debugging and messing around with the server I finally found out what the problem was. Even though Breeze was disabled, it was still serving pages from its cache, but only to non logged in users. WTF?

In the end I discovered that the ‘advanced-cache.php’ file was still being called by WordPress, and it contained calls to Breeze files. And since Breeze was installed, it ran even though it should not run (isn’t that what it means to disable a plugin?).

After all of that, I proceeded to finally delete the Breeze plugin from all my sites, and deleted the advanced-cache.php file from all of them.

I understand that caching plugins can sometimes get tricky, but this was really unexpected.