Caching can speed up your WordPress website, but if you are serving dynamic content, then you might need to clear that cache to reflect recent changes.

RunCloud Hub provides several granular options to manage your site’s cache. Understanding these options allows you to refresh content effectively without unnecessarily clearing everything.

In this post, we will explain the cache purging features available within your WordPress admin area when using RunCache managed by RunCloud.

Cache Purging Features in RunCloud Hub

Let’s quickly break down each RunCache purging feature, understand what it means, and see how to use it to manage your website.

First, navigate to the “RunCloud Hub -> RunCache -> Purger” section in your WordPress dashboard.

Quick Action Tab

The Quick Action tab on this screen provides convenient buttons for immediate cache and server management. You can manually click these buttons to perform these actions on demand, rather than waiting for automated triggers or navigating deeper into settings:

  • Clear All Cache: This button instantly removes all cached versions of your website’s pages and assets stored by RunCache. You can click this for an immediate site-wide refresh, which is particularly useful after making significant global updates or when troubleshooting display issues.
  • Clear Homepage Cache: This action clears the cached version of your website’s main landing page. Manually clicking this ensures your latest homepage content, such as a new banner or featured post, is instantly visible to visitors without affecting other cached pages.
  • Run Preload All Cache: This button instructs RunCache to proactively visit and generate cached versions of your site’s key pages, as defined in your sitemap or settings. You can manually trigger this after clearing the cache to “warm it up”. This ensures faster load times for the next visitors by serving them pre-built cached pages.
  • Fetch Server Stats: This retrieves the latest performance and resource usage data directly from your RunCloud server and displays it within your WordPress dashboard in the Stats section. 
  • Push Server Cache Rules: This action sends your current WordPress RunCache settings to your server to be actively applied. This may include exclusion rules, Nginx Helper settings, or cache lifespan configurations. You can manually push these rules to ensure your server immediately implements your most recent cache configurations after you’ve made changes in the WordPress admin.

Purge All Cache

This option instructs the RunCloud Hub to completely clear all cached versions of your website’s pages and assets stored by RunCache. It can be helpful if you make significant site-wide changes, such as a theme update, plugin activation, or critical CSS/JS modifications, to ensure all visitors see the newest content.

To use it, click the checkbox next to the trigger action you want to activate and click the Save Settings button at the bottom of the page.

After you save the setting, RunCloud Hub will automatically purge the cache when any of the selected actions are performed on your site. 

Purge Homepage

The “Purge Homepage” feature instructs the RunCloud Hub to remove the cached version of your website’s main landing page. This is particularly useful when you’ve updated content only on your homepage, like changing a banner, updating featured articles, or modifying introductory text, and want it to reflect immediately. It allows for a quick refresh of your site’s most prominent page without impacting the cache of other sections. 

Purge Post/Page/CPT

This function instructs the RunCloud Hub to clear the cache for an individual post, page, or custom post type (CPT) entry on your WordPress site. After editing or updating a specific piece of content, you will use this to ensure that the latest revisions are immediately visible to your audience without clearing unrelated cached pages.

RunCache often intelligently purges the specific item automatically when you save changes in the WordPress editor. This targeted approach preserves site performance by only refreshing what’s necessary.

Purge Archives

The “Purge Archives” functionality removes cached versions of your site’s archive pages, which include category listings, tag pages, and date-based archives. This is useful when new posts are published, existing ones are recategorized, or posts are deleted, as these actions alter the content of such archive listings. This feature ensures that visitors browsing these collective views can see the most current and accurate post collections. 

Custom Purge URL

The “Custom Purge URL” feature allows you to specify exact URL paths that RunCache should automatically clear whenever you initiate a “Purge Post/Page/CPT” action. You can add relative URL paths (e.g., /special-landing-page/ or /my-custom-sitemap.xml), one per line, that need refreshing when related content updates.

This functionality provides fine-grained control for scenarios where updating a post should clear the cache for other related URLs. To use this, enter the desired URL paths into the provided text area.

Scheduled Purge

The “Scheduled Purge” functionality enables you to automatically clear your entire site cache at predefined time intervals, such as every 12 hours, directly from your WordPress settings.

This feature is particularly beneficial if your server-side RunCache “Cache Lifespan” is set to a very long duration. It ensures your content doesn’t become excessively stale without manual intervention and helps automatically maintain a freshness baseline. You configure this by entering your desired time interval (e.g., 12 hours) in the provided text box.

If you have any other questions or need help – please feel free to get in touch with our 24/7 support team. We’re here to help!