As we all know, there’s a caching functionality on Joomla that is activated on most websites. This caching speeds up the website, while ensuring that the freshness of the content is not affected, because Joomla’s default caching only caches php code, and not the content itself.
A question on many Joomla website owners is “When should I clear the cache of my website?” (Note: It is “clear the cache” not “clean the cache”, you’re not cleaning anything, you’re just clearing/removing some files).
The answer is simple, you should clear the cache when you are updating/installing/removing any extension on your website. This is because you need to refresh the pages once you do this. Clearing the cache regularly, even if you haven’t changed anything on your website, is also recommended (there might be some subtle changes that you did and that you forgot they exist).
Not clearing the cache is a very common reason for a problem that our clients encounter quite often which is: “My Joomla changes are not showing!“.
Tips and warnings
– It is best to clear the cache at a time where your website receives the smallest number of visitors (such as 2 AM), especially if your website has a lot of cached files (over a 1,000), this is because the operation can be heavy on the server hosting your website (in other words, your website may be slower while you’re clearing the cache).
– Clearing your cache means that Joomla has to recreate the cache from scratch, which means that each page will take longer to load the first time it is visited after the cache. While you won’t feel this if your website is small, you will definitely notice it if you run a very big website.
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