Disable Caching

When using Simply Static, you abstract your publicly facing website from your WordPress website. This approach is similar to most caching setups used to speed up WordPress websites.

The problem is that your current caching setup does not affect your static website at all and often causes issues with updating it because the cached version is converted instead of the latest state of the website where you included your changes.

That's why we recommend to disable caching entirely.

Disable Caching Plugins

You should start by checking for plugins that manage caching within your WordPress website.

Some common examples of caching plugins that cause problems when going static are:

• WP Rocket
• W3TotalCache
• WP Super Cache
• WP Fastest Cache
• Cache Enabler

Even if your caching plugin isn't part of that list, we highly recommend disabling all other caching plugins.

Database Caching Plugins

Another common problem we see is the usage of Redis.

This is often a band-aid solution that should somehow magically fix the performance of a slow WordPress installation by caching database queries.

The use of Redis negatively affects the use of Simply Static by caching the results in our database table called prefix_simply_static_pages—the result is an endlessly running static export.

On a static export, we start fetching all the pages and files and store a reference in our database table. Once we downloaded the page or file, we remove the reference from our table and continued with the following result.

With Redis, these entries are not deleted from the database but from Redis storage instead.

We fetch the results from the database but delete the results from the Redis storage, resulting in an endless loop.

Some example plugins:

• Redis Object Cache
• WP Redis

We highly recommend disabling Redis when using Simply Static.

Server-Side Caching

This tends to be a problem with most premium WordPress hosting companies.

While it's great that caching is handled on the server side and that you don't need to use an additional plugin, it makes things more complicated when using Simply Static.

A couple of providers that use server-side caching that can cause problems with Simply Static:

• WP Engine
• Siteground
• Hostinger

We highly recommend checking their documentation to disable the cache when using Simply Static.