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 the global edge cache from the Performance settings 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.”

Object cache

On the Performance settings page, you’ll also find an option related to object cache. This feature improves performance by storing frequently used data, such as database query results, in memory. Instead of pulling the same data from the database each time it’s needed, your site can access it more quickly, which reduces server load and speeds up page delivery.

WordPress.com uses Memcached, a high-speed, memory-based caching system, to handle object caching. This feature is automatically enabled on all WordPress.com plans. While you can’t disable it, you can clear the cache if needed, as explained below.

Clear your site’s caches

If you’re on a plugin-enabled WordPress.com plan, you can manually clear your global edge cache, your object cache, or both with one click. On non-plugin-enabled plans, cache is cleared automatically, so the manual option is not available.

Here’s how the two caches differ:

• The global edge cache serves static versions of your site’s content to logged-out visitors from servers located around the world.
• The object cache stores dynamic data from your database to improve performance behind the scenes.

Examples of when to clear each:

• If you’ve updated your theme code and logged-out visitors don’t see the changes, try clearing the edge cache.
• If you’re seeing outdated or incorrect data from your database that doesn’t affect public-facing content, clearing the object cache may help.
• If you’re unsure which to clear, it’s safe 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 clearing the cache, the “Clear all caches” button will be temporarily disabled.