Divi Booster and Caching

The use of caching plugins for WordPress is a massive win in terms of performance. But they can also be a headache for webmasters who fail to see the changes they make to their site show up.

One of the most common issues people have when using Divi Booster is that their changes aren't applied. The culprit more often than not is that an old (pre-change) version of the page has been stored and is being shown to the user, instead of the nice new one.

This post is a work-in-progress attempt to help you identify and solve some common caching problems. I hope this will get you to an answer quicker and same me tearing my hair out quite so often.

Detecting a Caching Issue

The following can help you figure out if you have a caching issue:

  • The first sign that there may be a caching issue is that you attempt to make a change to the site (with Divi Booster or something else) and it doesn't show up. This doesn't guarantee that it's a caching issue – the problem could be a bug or CSS conflict, etc – but it should be a bit of a warning sign.
  • In this situation, compare what you see when you're logged out vs logged in. Some caching plugins always show the latest copy of the page to logged in users (so they can see their changes), but then show old copies to the user (for performance). If you see the change when logged in, but it disappears when you log out you've almost certainly got a caching issue.
  • Another test is to go to your site homepage, right click and select "View page source". This shows you the HTML code of the page. Scroll down to the bottom and you may see a HTML comment which tells you that the page was generated by a particular plugin at a particular time. Something like this:
    <!-- Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2015-01-24 20:31:10 -->
    

    The mere presence of this is enough to tell you that your page is probably being cached, but if you check the date and time given you may see for certain that the page was generated prior to you making the changes (in which case your changes wouldn't be shown on the page). Note that the time will be in your server's timezone, not necessarily your own.

Clearing your Caches

The immediate solution to a caching problem is to clear your caches. Doing so will force your site to generate a new copy of the page which should include your Divi Booster or other updates. The trick is knowing which caches you have.

  1. The first place to look is in your installed plugins. Go through the list of active plugins and any whose purpose is to speed up your site (e.g. WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc) are likely to perform caching and should have an option to clear (or "flush") their caches. If you can't see an option to clear the caches you may want to disable these plugins temporarily to see if they are the problem.
  2. Next look at whether you are using any site enhancing services such as CloudFlare. If so, log into your admin panel for these services (often through their own site) and look for an option to clear their caches.
  3. Now visit your site in your browser, and see if your changes have shown up.
  4. If so, great. If not there is one more thing to try – clearing your browser's cache. To do so, press CTRL-shift-delete (in most browsers) or locate the "clear history" feature using your browser's menu. Select to clear everything, making sure that any option to clear the caches is included in this. This will get rid of any old copies of the webpage that your browser is using.
  5. Reload your site in your browser. Hopefully the changes will now show up. If not, give me a shout and I'll try to get the issue sorted.

Caching Products

Here is an incomplete list of products which perform caching and if you use any of them I suggest clearing their caches to see if that allows the Divi Booster changes to show up:

  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Super Cache
  • CloudFlare (via cloudflare.com login)
  • Pagely

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11 Comments

  1. I have an issue where my images and videos on the website are not showing up. On refresh, they are visible. Then again when I load the site they are not. I tried a lot of things from ElegantThemes caching blog and now I am stuck with this issue.

    Reply
    • Hi Neha, I think this may be (in part at least) due to the way the Speed Booster Pack plugin is configured. It seems you have the "Scripts to footer" and "Defer parsing of js" options enabled. This appears to be causing the jQuery library to load later and causing other code that is expecting it earlier to generate errors. This results in a cascade effect which is blocking the images / videos from loading.

      I suggest disabling those two options in the plugin, clearing any caches and your browser history, and refreshing the page. Hopefully that will get it working again.

      Reply
      • Thank you Dan!!! That really helped! :)

        Reply
  2. I've been having issues with W3 Total Cache and the Divi theme. Enabling the HTML/XML Gzip compression results in weird characters across the screen. According to the W3 Total Cache documentation:

    I see garbage characters instead of the normal web site, what's going on here?

    If a theme or it's files use the call php_flush() or function flush() that will interfere with the plugins normal operation; making the plugin send cached files before essential operations have finished. The flush() call is no longer necessary and should be removed.

    Is this something that Divi Booster will help fix or is there an easy way to delete php_flush from the Divi theme itself?

    Reply
    • Hi Well Prepared. I just scanned Divi to see where it was using flush / php_flush, but it doesn't appear to be using them anywhere, so I suspect something else is triggering the issue.

      One thing you could try is to use Divi Booster's option to enable compression (found under "Site-wide Settings > Site Speed"), instead of W3 Total Cache's option. They both do essentially the same thing, but in slightly different ways. With any luck the issue won't occur when using the Divi Booster option.

      Reply
  3. Geek Cache (http://geek-cache.com) is a new plugin and it is really good with Divi and Elegant Themes in general. Haven't tried it with Divi Booster though.

    Reply
    • Okay, cool! Thanks for sharing, and if you do test it with Divi Booster, I'd love to hear how you get on.

      Reply
  4. I am having an issue with W3 Total Cache making my social icons disappear. I know it's an issue with Total Cache because when I inactivate the plugin, they come back. I have cleared the cache on TC and still doesn't work. Do you know any particular settings that would cause this? I am a paid user of your plugin

    Reply
    • Hi Mike, I've just released an update to Divi Booster (v2.1.9) to fix the issue. I've changed the way the feature is implemented to avoid the conflict with TC entirely. Let me know if you have any issues with it.

      P.S. I believe that having TC enabled at all was enough to trigger the issue, so the only solutions I know of are to disable TC or update to the latest version of Divi Booster.

      Reply
  5. Hi there,

    I am actually having specific issues with caching issues with W3 Total Cache. I’ve cleared the cache several times and have been unable to resolve this issue. When I’m logged in as admin or turn off W3 Total Cache, I can see the additional social icons I’ve added in the secondary nav bar, but when I turn the plugin back on or am logged out, I can’t see them.

    Reply
    • Hi Jason, I've updated Divi Booster to fix this conflict with W3 Total Cache. If you upgrade to the latest version, the issue should hopefully go away.

      Reply

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