How to Clear WordPress Cache

Speeding up your WordPress site is one of the best strategies to improve its performance. A quick-loading website enhances user experience, helps retain visitors, and also plays a key role in achieving better search engine rankings. While choosing a reliable hosting provider plays a big role, enabling caching can further enhance your site’s speed. Caching stores copies of your WordPress content, including images, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, so that browsers don’t need to fetch them repeatedly from the server. This helps lower the workload on the server and makes your web pages load more quickly.

However, sometimes cached data can prevent recent changes from appearing on your site. For example, if you update a post, tweak your design, or add new features, visitors may still see the old version due to cached files. In these situations, you should clear the WordPress cache.

In this article, we will explain why clearing the cache is important and how you can clear cached data effectively.

Clear WordPress Cache

To clear your site’s cache, first, log in to your WordPress.com account and click on the WordPress icon in the top-left corner to open the list of your sites:

From the list, choose the website you want to manage. You will now be redirected to the Hosting Overview dashboard, click on the Settings tab, and select the Caching option under the Server section:

Alternatively, you can press ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows/Linux) to open the Hosting Command Palette and search for “Cache”. After this, click on the Clear All button to remove both edge and object caches: 

Wait a few seconds until you see a confirmation message. After clearing, the cache buttons will remain disabled for one minute. 

After this, you can enable Global Edge Cache in the Caching section under Settings by checking the option: 

It stores your site’s content closer to visitors, making pages load faster. As a result, users enjoy smoother browsing, engagement rises, and search visibility improves.

Purge WP Cache Using a Plugin

You can reset the WordPress cache with the help of a caching plugin. Many users prefer this method because it lets them manage cache from a single dashboard. Popular plugins include LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, and WP Rocket. 

In this guide, we will utilize LiteSpeed Cache, a widely used tool in WordPress, to enhance website performance. For this purpose, navigate to your WordPress dashboard, select Add New Plugin from the Plugins section, and search for “LiteSpeed Cache”. Once it appears in the results, simply install and activate it:

Once the plugin is installed, a LiteSpeed Cache option will appear in the left sidebar of your dashboard. Click on it and open the Toolbox menu to access the LiteSpeed Cache Toolbox. Here, you can clear different types of cache, such as page cache or CSS/JS cache, depending on your needs:

To clear all cached data, simply click Purge All. It wouldn’t remove any important information from your site, so it’s safe to use. If you only want to reset the cache for particular sections, go to the “Purge By…” option and specify the details like a category, tag, and URL:

Besides using the WordPress dashboard, you can clear the cache of a single page directly. To do that, make sure you are signed in as an admin, navigate to the page, hover over the LiteSpeed icon in the top bar, and click the Purge this page option:

To ensure your site loads correctly, don’t forget to clear your browser cache, any caching plugins, and server-level caches.

Final Thoughts

Managing your WordPress cache is key to maintaining a fast and responsive website. While caching helps improve performance, it can sometimes store outdated data and prevent updates from appearing. Flushing the cache from your dashboard, plugins, or other tools makes sure that visitors always access the latest version of your website. For even better performance, enabling advanced features such as Global Edge Cache can deliver content more efficiently worldwide.

With regular cache management, you can keep your WordPress site both optimized and reliable for every visitor. In this article, we explained how you can clear WordPress cache to improve site speed, fix display issues, and ensure visitors always see the latest updates.

FAQ