Global Edge Cache

WordPress.com’s Global Edge Cache makes your site load faster for visitors around the world by taking advantage of our global network of data centers. Enabling this caching feature brings your content closer to your visitors, wherever they might be—this means faster load times, less waiting, and a better overall experience.

Many hosts charge extra for this kind of edge caching or require integration with a third-party provider. On WordPress.com, global edge caching is included on every plan without any bandwidth restrictions.

How to enable Global Edge Caching

The WordPress.com Global Edge Cache is always enabled for sites on the Free, Personal, and Premium plans. On a Business or Commerce site, you can enable Global Edge Cache from the Hosting Configuration page.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Visit your site’s dashboard and navigate to Hosting → Overview (or Settings → Hosting Configuration if using the default interface style).
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Click Performance in the sidebar.
4. Click the toggle for  “Enable global edge caching for faster content delivery.”

Clear your site’s cache

You can clear your global edge cache, your object cache, or both with just one click on plugin-enabled WordPress.com plans. On non-plugin-enabled plans, the cache is flushed automatically. For this reason, it’s not necessary to do it, and the option isn’t available.

While your site’s global edge cache serves copies of your site’s rendered content/pages to logged-out visitors from the edge, your site’s object cache stores a variety of data types from the database to improve performance.

To help distinguish between the caches, consider the following examples:

• If you’ve made a code change to your theme and logged-out visitors aren’t seeing the update, clearing the edge cache is usually enough.
• If unexpected data is returned from the database and the issue doesn’t affect public-facing posts or pages, then clearing the object cache is usually enough. 
• However, if you’re unsure which cache to clear, it’s best to clear both.

If you are on a plugin-enabled plan, take the following steps to clear your global edge cache, your object cache, or both:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard and navigate to Hosting → Overview (or Settings → Hosting Configuration if using the default interface style).
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Click Performance in the sidebar.
4. Click the button to correspond with the cache you’d like to clear.
5. Wait a moment until you see a success notice.

After the cache is cleared, the “Clear all caches” button will be momentarily disabled, and you’ll see this message: “You cleared the cache recently. Please wait a minute and try again.”