How to Set Up WooCommerce Caching: The Ultimate Guide in 2025

Enabling caching on a WooCommerce store is an important but delicate process that balances performance with functionality.

Unlike a static blog, an e-commerce site is highly dynamic, managing user-specific data like shopping carts, account information, and personalized content.

A misconfigured cache can lead to serious issues, such as showing one customer’s cart to another or displaying incorrect order information, ultimately destroying user trust and costing sales.

When we configure the cache, our goal is to aggressively cache static content and anonymous user page views while intelligently bypassing the cache for dynamic elements and logged-in users.

This guide will walk you through how to properly implement caching for your WooCommerce store. By following these principles, you can significantly reduce server load, decrease page load times, and provide a faster, more reliable shopping experience for your customers without compromising the dynamic nature of your e-commerce operations.

Let’s get started!

What is WooCommerce Caching?

Caching instructs your server to build a web page only once and then save a static, ready-to-go copy. Instead of repeating the resource-heavy process of running code and fetching data from the database for every visitor, the server can instantly deliver this pre-made version, dramatically accelerating your site’s performance.

The most important part of building a good cache is being smart about what to save. Modern CMSs such as WooCommerce intelligently create copies of static pages that are the same for everyone, like product pages or category listings, to make them load incredibly quickly. At the same time, it knows to exclude dynamic pages unique to each user, such as the shopping cart and checkout pages, ensuring that customers only see their items and personal information.

📖 Suggested read: How to Easily Optimize Your WordPress Website With RunCloud Hub

Benefits of WooCommerce Caching

The primary benefit of caching your WooCommerce store is a massive boost in website speed. Faster-loading pages create a significantly better user experience, which keeps shoppers from getting frustrated and leaving your site. This leads directly to more sales and a lower cart abandonment rate.

In addition to improving conversions, the website speed is an important factor for search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines favor fast websites, so a well-cached store will rank higher in search results, bringing you more free, organic traffic.

Finally, caching reduces the workload on your server and allows your store to handle many more visitors at once without slowing down or crashing, which is essential for surviving busy shopping seasons like Black Friday.

📖 Suggested read: How to Use Redis Full-Page Caching to Speed Up WordPress

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Set Up WooCommerce Caching

Follow the steps below to develop an effective caching strategy for your WooCommerce site.

1. Choosing the Right Caching Solution

The first (and arguably the most important) decision is selecting the appropriate caching technology for your hosting environment. Your options fall into two broad categories: plugin-based caching and server-level caching.

Caching plugins such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache are user-friendly options that allow you to edit and manage your caching settings from the WordPress application. Although convenient, this adds processing overhead, as WordPress must still load to serve a cached page.

You should consider using server-level caching, a superior approach to achieve maximum performance. Modern caching plugins, such as LiteSpeed’s LSCache, operate at the web server level, before WordPress is even loaded. This allows them to serve cached pages with minimal latency and resource consumption, resulting in significantly faster response times.

However, if you are using RunCloud, you can consider using the RunCloud Hub, which provides a good balance between the two by offering both native NGINX FastCGI cache (RunCache) and Redis Page caching. For RunCloud users, RunCloud Hub is the most efficient approach as it is specifically optimized for the server stack.

📖 Suggested read: The Best Free eCommerce Platforms for Selling in 2025

2. Installing and Configuring Your Caching Plugin

Once you have chosen your caching solution, the next step is installation and initial configuration. If using a plugin like WP Rocket, installation is straightforward via the WordPress dashboard. After activation, most modern caching plugins automatically detect that WooCommerce is active and apply a default set of safe exclusion rules. These presets typically prevent the caching of critical pages like Cart, Checkout, and My Account, providing a solid baseline to prevent major functional issues.

If you are using RunCloud, you don’t need to leave your RunCloud dashboard, as you can enable RunCloud Hub within your RunCloud dashboard and your WordPress web application.

During the initial setup, you should avoid enabling every performance feature simultaneously. Start by enabling the core page caching feature for logged-out users. After confirming the site still functions correctly, you can incrementally enable other options like CSS or JavaScript minification, testing thoroughly after each change.

📖 Suggested read: How to Fix WordPress High CPU Usage (10 Instant Solutions)

3. Excluding Dynamic WooCommerce Pages from Cache

The single most important rule of WooCommerce caching is never to cache pages that display user-specific information publicly.

Caching these pages would result in one user’s private data being served to other visitors, a catastrophic failure for any online store.

The primary pages that must be excluded from any page caching mechanism are the Cart, Checkout, and My Account pages. By default, their URL slugs are /cart/, /checkout/, and /my-account/, respectively.

To prevent this scenario at a technical level, the server sends specific instructions to browsers and intermediate caches through HTTP headers. This is handled by using the Cache-Control: private header. This HTTP header specifies that the response is intended for a single user’s browser and must not be stored by any shared cache, such as a CDN or a server-level cache like RunCache. This is often accompanied by a no-store directive for maximum security.

Almost all caching plugins and server-level configurations provide a setting labeled “Never Cache URLs” or “Exclude URLs”. You must add the relative paths for these private pages in this section. It is best practice to use wildcards to ensure all sub-pages are also excluded from the cache. For example, adding /my-account/* will ensure that account-specific pages, such as order history and address management, are excluded from the cache.

📖 Suggested read: Server Cache vs. Browser Cache vs. Site Cache: What’s the Difference?

4. Excluding WooCommerce Sessions and Cookies from Cache

In addition to excluding specific URLs, you must be aware of WooCommerce cookies. WooCommerce uses cookies to track user sessions and cart contents, even for guests who are not logged in.

For example, the woocommerce_cart_hash cookie tracks changes to the shopping cart, and the wp_woocommerce_session_ cookie contains a unique code corresponding to the customer’s session data in the database. When these cookies are present in a visitor’s browser, it signifies that the user has an active, personalized session.

To ensure your website works as expected, you must configure your caching system to bypass the cache entirely whenever these specific WooCommerce cookies are detected. This ensures that any user who has added an item to their cart or is logged in receives a fresh, non-cached page from the server. It also ensures that dynamic elements like the mini-cart and user-specific pricing function correctly.

📖 Suggested read: Everything You Need to Know About WordPress Object Caching

5. Configuring Minification Settings

Minification is removing unnecessary characters (like whitespace and comments) from CSS and JavaScript files and combining them to reduce the number of server requests.

The minification process can improve load times and cause unexpected errors and conflicts, particularly with the complex JavaScript used by WooCommerce and its many extensions. When enabling minification, proceed cautiously and test rigorously after each change is recommended.

We recommend enabling CSS minification first and thoroughly testing the site’s layout and design. Once satisfied, you can enable JavaScript minification and test all interactive elements, paying close attention to the add-to-cart functionality, image galleries on product pages, and checkout. If you encounter a broken feature, you can configure your caching plugin to exclude specific CSS or JavaScript files from minification.

📖 Suggested read: LiteSpeed Cache WordPress Plugin Configuration Tutorial

6. Integrating CDN and Edge Caching with WooCommerce

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a set of computers that can distribute your static assets, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript, across a worldwide network of servers. This drastically reduces latency for international visitors by serving files from a location geographically closer to them.

Using a CDN to serve static assets is highly recommended for WooCommerce. Most caching plugins provide a dedicated section for rewriting asset URLs to point to the CDN. Modern caching solutions, such as Cloudflare or Bunny.net Accelerator, take this a step further by caching the full HTML of your pages at the CDN level.

The edge cache must be configured to respect the same exclusion rules as your on-site cache, bypassing the cache for dynamic URLs (cart, checkout) and any visitor with a WooCommerce session cookie.

This ensures the CDN edge doesn’t serve a stale, generic page to an active shopper. Proper integration ensures your origin server sends the correct Cache-Control headers, which a well-configured caching plugin will manage for you.

📖 Suggested read: How to Use Redis Object Cache To Speed Up a Dynamic WordPress Site

7. Setting Up Object Caching (Redis/Memcached) for WooCommerce

Caching web pages allows you to store and serve fully rendered HTML pages, but that’s not the only thing you can cache. Loading a web page launches several repetitive and complex database queries that take a long time to execute. An object cache, such as Redis or Memcached, can store the results of these database queries in the server’s fast-access RAM.

This Object caching functionality can provide a massive performance boost for a query-heavy application such as WooCommerce, which constantly checks product stock, sale prices, user permissions, and session data. This is especially useful for logged-in users and during backend operations where page caching is not active.

Enabling object caching can be tricky if you do it manually, but using RunCloud Hub allows you to configure it with a single click. Simply navigate to the RunCloud Hub page in your RunCloud dashboard and select Enable next to the Redis Object Cache setting.

Enabling this optimization significantly reduces the load on your MariaDB/MySQL database, which leads to faster dynamic page generation, a more responsive WordPress admin area, and a snappier experience for active shoppers navigating your store.

📖 Suggested read: How to Easily Optimize Your WordPress Website With RunCloud Hub

8. Enabling Redis ACL for Object Caching

When you enable caching for your WooCommerce store, you inherently handle sensitive personal data and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). If you host multiple WordPress websites on the same server, this can create a security risk.

In the case of a breach, if one of the websites gets infected, the attacker can access the cached data of other sites.

To protect this data, it’s recommended that you enable Redis Access Control Lists (ACLs). This ensures that each website can only access its own cached data. It will also prevent a malicious plugin on one site from accessing the Redis data of your other sites.

However, correctly configuring and maintaining this security can be challenging. That’s why we’ve pre-configured it in RunCloud Hub. When you install our plugin, Redis ACLs are automatically set up for your website, providing robust security with no extra effort.

You can verify this setting by navigating to the “Redis Object Cache Constants” section in the RunCloud Hub settings menu. If you see the following screen, then it is configured correctly.

9. Testing and Troubleshooting Your Cache

Creating a caching system is one thing, but running it is another. A flawed cache configuration can go unnoticed while silently costing you sales. After you deploy your cache, you should use two different web browsers or a regular and an incognito window to test it.

Browse the site in the incognito window (representing a new, logged-out visitor) to ensure you are being served fast, cached pages. In the regular browser, log in as a test customer to verify that all dynamic functionality works correctly.

During the tests, you should perform a complete test transaction: add a product to the cart, view the cart page, proceed to checkout, and check the mini-cart widget on various pages to ensure it updates correctly.

Check that personalized content for logged-in users appears as it should. If you encounter an issue, the first step is to clear all caches, the plugin’s cache, any server-level cache, your CDN cache, and your browser cache, before re-testing.

If a problem persists, disable your most recently changed setting (e.g., JS minification) and test again, working backward to isolate the source of the conflict. You can also use your browser’s developer tools to inspect page response headers. This lets you see cache status codes in HTTP headers like X-Cache: HIT or X-RunCache-Status: BYPASS to confirm your rules are working as intended.

Final Thoughts: Achieving Peak WooCommerce Performance with RunCloud

In this guide, we have shown you that properly configuring cache for a WooCommerce store is a multi-layered process that requires a deep understanding of how static and dynamic content interact.

Although manual configuration offers granular control, it also introduces multiple potential failure points that can be time-consuming to troubleshoot and disastrous if implemented incorrectly.

This is precisely why we developed RunCloud Hub, our all-in-one optimization and management plugin.

Built to integrate seamlessly with the RunCloud platform and eliminate these complexities, RunCloud Hub handles the actions mentioned above automatically and provides WooCommerce-aware caching out of the box with no manual rules required.

Want WooCommerce caching without the headaches? Try RunCloud Hub, which is built for store owners.

One of the most impactful optimizations for a busy WooCommerce store is Redis Object Caching, which dramatically speeds up backend operations and dynamic requests for logged-in users. This process can be tedious and complex, requiring the deployment of a Redis instance, installing a connector plugin, and manually configuring the connection.

However, RunCloud Hub transforms this complex task into a single click. It automatically detects your RunCloud-managed Redis server and enables you to do object caching.

By combining the raw power of RunCloud’s server-level caching with the intelligent, WooCommerce-aware optimizations of RunCloud Hub, you can achieve fast performance without needing to be a caching expert.

This allows you to focus on what truly matters: growing your business, managing your products, and serving your customers.

Ready to boost your store’s speed, stability, and conversions?

Get started with RunCloud Hub and let your caching configure itself.

FAQs on WooCommerce Caching