Help Centre / Performance

Clear The Cache

Updated 2 October 2026

Most of the time you do not need this page. Publishing or updating a post or page clears the cache for you, and so does changing your permalink structure. You make the change, you look at the site, the change is there.

This page is for the times it is not there. Clearing the cache by hand takes a few seconds and is completely safe, so it is a reasonable first move whenever you suspect you are looking at an old copy of a page.

When Clearing Helps

Clearing helps when you changed something the platform could not know about. The usual cases are:

• You edited a theme file, a template or a stylesheet over SFTP.
• You changed something directly in the database.
• You changed a file over SFTP or ran a command over SSH.
• You changed a setting in a plugin that affects the front end without touching a post.
• You uninstalled a caching plugin that had been fighting with the platform.

Clearing does not help with a slow site. An empty cache is slower, not faster, until it fills again. If the complaint is speed rather than a stale page, read why a WordPress site feels slow instead.

Step 1: Check You Are Really Seeing A Cached Page

If the page looks correct in a private window, the cache you need to clear is your own browser’s, not the platform’s. Hard-reload the page and you are done.

If the page is wrong in a private window too, carry on.

Step 2: Clear The Cache From The Tools Tab

In the members area at my.oxyforge.com, open the website, then open its Tools tab and press Clear Cache.

It starts straight away and takes a few seconds. Nothing is deleted and no visitor is logged out. The next request for each page rebuilds the stored copy, so the first visit to a page after a clear is a little slower than usual while it fills again.

Reload the page in a private window and check.

Step 3: If A Changed PHP File Still Runs The Old Code

PHP keeps compiled code in memory so it does not have to read and parse your files on every request. It checks for changed files every couple of seconds, so a file you replaced over SFTP is normally picked up on its own. If the old version is clearly still running after a cache clear, open a ticket: restarting PHP for a site is something support does for you.

Step 4: Work Out Which Layer Is Holding The Copy

If a page is still wrong after the above, narrow it down. Three caches are involved and they fail in different ways. See how caching works for what each one does.

• An image, stylesheet or script is the wrong version. That is usually Cloudflare holding the old file. Change the filename, or add a version query to the URL, which is what WordPress does for you when a theme or plugin updates properly. A renamed file is served fresh immediately.
• The HTML of the page is wrong. That is the page cache, and the clear in step 2 covers it. If it is wrong again within minutes, something is writing the old content back, usually a leftover caching plugin.
• A menu, a widget, a product count or an option value is wrong. That is the object cache. Clearing the cache from Tools covers it. If one specific value is stubbornly wrong, saving the setting again in WordPress is the cleanest fix, because it rewrites the stored value properly.

If It Keeps Coming Back

A page that goes stale again straight after a clear is a sign of something else at work. Check your installed plugins for anything that does page caching, object caching or asset minification and remove it. Those plugins store their own copies in their own places, and the platform cannot clear what it does not control.

If you have removed the plugin and the problem continues, open a ticket from the members area with the exact URL and what you expect to see on it. That is enough for us to look at which layer is serving the page.