What is Smart Refresh?

Updated on October 22nd, 2020

Note

This article outlines our Smart Refresh feature. For a rundown on what FlyCache is and what our CDN setup is like on Flywheel, be sure to check out our page on Site Speed.

Smart Refresh is a feature we’ve introduced for all sites running on our Flywheel Cloud Platform with FlyCache enabled. In a nutshell, Smart Refresh allows site changes and updates to be displayed quickly on the front-end of a site without the need to clear the entire cache.

Traditionally, there is no way to clear parts of FlyCache 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 a caching exclusion for a page, normally to see your changes right away you would need to clear your site’s cache manually from the Flywheel dashboard.

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

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 Smart Refresh! If you have any further questions regarding this feature, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our Happiness Engineers via the Help page.