Private caching not working on home page

Hi, Jlahm

Hmmm. Thanks for all of the details. I understand the issue, but I’m not sure offhand why it’s behaving that way.

Can you share the URL to your site so I can take a look, and a copy of the environment report so I can see what settings you have enabled? (Visit LiteSpeed Cache > Environment Report)

Thanks!

Hi Jlahm,

Do you mind to try set home page as a private page?
See this picture. https://i.imgur.com/OvKUDfw.png
Simply add by access home page, click litespeed button, mark this page as private page.

Let us know if it works or not.

Best,
Eric

I’m sorry Eric if I’m a little dense, but I can’t find that button or those options anywhere. When I go to the WP Dashboard and edit the home page (or any page), then the only LiteSpeed icon I see is in the top WP menubar and it says “LiteSpeed Cache Purge All”.

Hi, jlahm

You shouldn’t be in the WordPress Dashboard to do it. Visit your home page, and then press the admin bar button. You should see the options then.

Hope this helps ??

Ah, the WP admin bar that I have hidden on site pages… ??

I went into the WP Dashboard in Chrome and enabled the WP Admin bar. In a separate Firefox browser, I then logged into the site’s home page as usual. The problem with the menu and content not being changed still occurred, and the WP admin bar was not visible. I went back to the WP Dashboard in Chrome and clicking on the Visit Site link to view the site’s home page. Here the WP admin bar did show up (which is interesting…), so I marked the home page as Private Cache. I then went back to the Firefox version and refreshed the home page and now things look great – the WP admin bar is present, the site’s menu is changed as expected, and the home page content is changed to reflect the logged-in user.

I hope this provides a clue, and a potential work-around for me by marking the page as private cache. Unfortunately, that means the home page isn’t cached for users until they visit the page.

Did you clear the cache after you changed the admin bar settings? It’s possible the Firefox instance was looking at an old cached copy, and that is why it didn’t look any different when you first went there.

When you changed the page to Private in the Chrome instance, that would have cleared the cache, making is show up fine in Firefox the next time you visited.

I think it should be fine now, but let us know if you run into any more issues!

As a quick follow-up, I now find that the login works and the WP admin bar, home page text and menus are changed once I marked the home page as “private cache”. But, now when I logout I have the opposite problem – I still see the logged-in version (with changed menus and text and the WP admin bar). Looking at the HTTP headers, it says “x-litespeed-cache: hit, private”. Clearing the browser’s cache does then allow me to see the proper non-logged-in version. However, I did find that if I tell LiteSpeed to not cache the cookie PHPSESSID then everything appears to work correctly.

Thanks for your patience!

No problem at all! Happy to help ??

My gut tells me that excluding PHPSESSID from cache could have the effect of excluding many otherwise cacheable pages. There is probably a better way…

Clearing the browser’s cache does then allow me to see the proper non-logged-in version.

This makes me think that you may have your browser caching the full page, when it should only be caching static content (like images, JS, CSS, etc). To verify whether this is happening, you can take a look at your .htaccess file and look for the following text:
ExpiresByType text/html
If it has a value other than 0, then your browser is caching the full page, and overriding LiteSpeed’s cache.

If you don’t see that, but you do see
ExpiresDefault
That, too, can cause the same problem.

Here’s a wiki page that describes the issue in more detail, and how to fix it.

If this isn’t the issue, and you want to pursue this further, you can provide the site URL and an environment report (LiteSpeed Cache > Environment Report), and we can troubleshoot a bit.

An update. I did not have the ExpiresByType text/html or ExpiresDefault set. Setting them to 0 had no effect and the problem continued.

However, I think I have resolved the problem. As I had noted before, deleting the PHPSESSID cookie or setting it to not be cached did fix the problem. But as you noted, that likely had side-effects. I was using PHP Sessions which is why the PHPSESSID cookie exited. I installed the WP Session Manager plugin which handles session information outside of the PHP session manager and changed my code to use it instead of PHP sessions. Everything is working nicely now.

Thanks again for your patience and your suggestions! Knock on wood I think things are good – for now… ?? I do greatly appreciate the prompt and helpful support I’ve always received from the A2 support staff.

Oh, good, I am glad to hear that you solved the problem! Thanks for coming back to share the answer, too ??