An owner updates a price on his website. He checks the page and the old price is still there. He updates it again, more carefully, and it is still there.
By the time he has edited the same field four times, cleared nothing and started to suspect he is losing his mind, the correct price has been saved four times over.
The page he is looking at was generated an hour ago and stored, and nothing he does in an editor will change it until something clears that copy.
1. Understand that there are usually four caches
The browser, a caching plugin, the host's own layer and any content delivery network in front of the site. A change has to survive all four to be visible.
2. Check in a private window first
This eliminates the browser instantly and tells you whether the problem is yours or the server's. It takes five seconds and it prevents most wasted afternoons.
3. Clear from the inside outwards
Plugin cache, then host cache, then the delivery network. Clearing them in a random order produces a confusing result where the old page reappears from a layer you already cleared.
4. Know that logged in views differ
Many caching setups bypass the cache for logged in users, so an owner sees the new version and every visitor sees the old one. This is the most misleading version of the problem.
5. Understand what a delivery network holds
Copies of pages and assets in many locations. Purging it can take minutes, and until it completes different visitors genuinely see different versions of the site.
6. Watch out for script combining
Minification and combining are where third party widgets break, and excluding the widget's script usually fixes it immediately, which is the ground in plugin conflict questions wordpress owners ask.
7. Exclude the pages that must be live
Checkout, account areas, anything with personalised content and anything with live availability. Caching these produces the worst class of error, where a customer sees somebody else's state.
8. Do not cache your way out of a slow site
Caching hides a slow site from repeat visitors and does little for the first mobile view that matters most, which is the point made in page speed questions before adding anything.
9. Set a sensible expiry
Very long expiry times make every future change painful. Very short ones remove most of the benefit. A middle value with a manual purge on publish works for most sites.
10. Clear after every deployment
Any change to templates, scripts or configuration should be followed by a purge as a matter of routine rather than as a reaction to a report.
11. Remember that search engines see cached pages too
Stale prices or availability being served to a crawler is a real problem, and it is closely related to the visibility issues in category and search visibility questions from sellers.
12. Keep live data out of cached pages
Stock, availability and anything time sensitive should be fetched rather than baked into a page. This is why an assistant answering from live data behaves correctly when a page does not.
13. Write the procedure down
Which caches exist on this site, in what order, and where the buttons are. Every owner works this out once, forgets it, and works it out again six months later.
14. Know whether you need a plugin at all
A script based widget sidesteps several of these problems entirely, which is the comparison in do you need a plugin to add a chatbot. See the integrations, draft replies with the ai reply generator, see features, and the sector view sits under small business.