Cloudflare & WPengine concerns

This is the eternal dilemma with cache. Caching as a principle is great, but it’s is a double-edged sword and when misused or misconfigured it typically breaks the results that you want.

I’m an advocate of less caching the better for standard WordPress sites. Optimize your browser cache directives and perhaps use some light database cache stuff, but page caches should be avoided.

I would also, where possible optimize assets such as CSS and JS into minified and combined files, thereby reducing page load and request. CloudFlare helps massively with this in certain regards.

Otherwise, generic page cache completely sucks for all but the most simple static sites.

Think of it like this:
– does enabling certain cache methods/engines make my website inconsistent under any possible circumstances?
– If yes, then remove that cache.
– If No, then you have a compatible caching/optimization engine.

Correct > Faster.

That’s my opinion, your mileage may vary. ??

Hi,

My site is hosted on WP-Engine and I am using this plugin for my site.
After checking from different country proxies, i was not getting the desired result i.e some contents must be hidden for Canada.

After checking the code three times, i figured that the problem was with the server-side cache. I have just finished chatting with WP-Engine support to ask them to disable the server-side cache for my Homepage but they said:
“I’m sorry but we are not able to disable the page cache on an entire site
Or the home page
It is part of our server environment and can cause load issues on the server”

So, This plugin shall not be effective for sites that are hosted on a server that uses page cache.

@miketopher
You may check how your site looks like in different countries by using proxy for that country. You may find list of proxy sites for countries here:
https://free-proxy-list.net/
(using the servers with port 8080 are easy to configure in my experience)

Then you can configure your browser to use this proxy as described here:
https://www.multiip.net/set-proxy-browsers/

Hope this post help someone.

Regards,

Rao

Hi,

This is a pity, but what it hightlights to me is the need of this sort of things to be further developed.

I have ideas on how to do this, that would by-pass page caches with a combination of the existing GeoIP database and Javascript. The problem is the development time and costs needed. I have put out the suggestion a couple of times whether a premium/paid plugin is a option for some, but I’ve only ever got a luke-warm response. :/

I will probably do it eventually, I just can’t say when… I’ve got keep the lights on too ;D

Thanks for leaving a nice review even though the plugin wasn’t suitable for your needs just now… it’s a rare event, and I really appreciate your support in doing so.

Those tools for checking proxies etc is great! I’m going to add that to the FAQ in the next update.

Thank you!