What is Smart Refresh?

Smart Refresh is a feature we’ve introduced for all sites running on our cloud platform, with FlyCache enabled. In a nutshell, Smart Refresh is an amazing new feature that will allow site changes and updates to be seen on the front-end of a site, without the need to clear the entire cache.

Traditionally on our cloud platform, there was no way to clear parts of cache in order to see updates instantly on a site or page (this was instead determined by a cache expiry time). And while it’s possible for our wonderful support team to set up an exclusion for a page, to see these changes straight away you would normally need to clear your site’s cache.

While clearing the entire site cache isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for particularly busy sites (we’re talking multiple thousands, tens of thousands of daily visitors), clearing the entire cache can have a substantial impact on performance whilst the cache is built back up after the flush.

Ok, this sounds great, how does it work?

On our side of things, (when Smart Refresh is enabled) FlyCache will do the following:

• Monitor WordPress “post” activity on Posts, Pages, Attachments, Revisions and the Navigation Menu
• Determine what page(s) display that content
• Refresh the content only for the affected page(s) via more granular caching clear

Actions that will initiate a Smart Refresh include:

• Creation
• Edit
• Scheduling
• Deletion

And that’s a rundown on how Smart Refresh works! If you have any further questions or queries regarding Smart Refresh or anything at all – please don’t hesitate to reach out to our happiness engineers at our Help page.