Performance Plugins and Create

Caching, minifying, deferring, optimizing.

Karla avatar
Written by Karla
Updated over a week ago

Publishers use several different caching plugins to speed up their site. Sometimes this can create conflicts with out-of-date content or assets.

If something isn't behaving as expecting, a good place to start investigating are caching or performance plugins.

Here's a list of practices we'd recommend. (We'll keep this article up-to-date as issues are reported.)

General

  • After updating, if you notice your admin interface looks broken, do a hard refresh by pressing Cmd+Shift+R on Mac or Ctrl+F5 on Windows. When we do an update, we follow best practices to ensure you get the latest version of our CSS and JavaScript. However, some plugins keep these assets cached. This reloads the page and fetches the most up-to-date assets.

  • Disable caching for logged-in users. Depending on your plugin of choice, this setting might be called something else. When you're logged in, having caching enabled can effect whether or not your changes are being correctly saved or seen by you.

  • If a card isn't updating on the front-end, purge the cache for the post. If that doesn't work, try republishing the card. We try to work with major caching plugins to purge caches whenever a card is published, but sometimes this doesn't work. Usually, purging a cache is enough to fix the issue. In some cases, however, the published card data is out of sync with the card data we automatically save as your editing. If this happens, clicking the "Publish" button will republish the card data (there's no need to update the blog post, in this case.)

  • If client-side CSS or JS isn't loading, check to see if it's being re-minified or concatenated with other plugins. We already minify our client-side assets, so they can be omitted from minification - depending on the plugin and minifier being used, this has been known to cause issues. If this doesn't fix the issue, omitting them from being concatenated with other JavaScript has also been known to fix issues. (Note that sometimes, just purging assets has fixed issues. Depending on the plugin, these steps will be different.)

Plugin-Specific

Autoptimize

  • Disable "Also aggregate inline JS." Our client-side card's JavaScript loads asynchronously. We use wp_localize_script in order to pass necessary data to our script. This setting causes our localizations to not be available to our script when it runs, which prevents them from running.

Litespeed

  • Disable “Cache Rest API.” Anytime you’re using Create, you’re also taking advantage of the WordPress Rest API. Caching the Rest API can sometimes affect the functionality of Create, so if you’re using Litespeed and you notice any unexpected behavior from Create you can try disabling this setting.

SG Optimizer

  • Disable Minify JavaScript. In the Frontend Optimization tab of SG Optimizer there's a setting called Minify JavaScript Files. This has been known to re-optimize the Create JS file, which affects how Create cards render on the front end. If you're not able to exclude Create from that setting, try disabling it altogether.

  • This plugin is incompatible with Create. More accurately, conflicts between WP External Links and any plugin that uses a PHP technique called output buffering can indirectly cause issues with Create and other REST API functionality, including core WordPress.

Perfmatters

  • Disable REST API. When this setting is set to “Disable for Non-Admins” users that do not have administrator level permission may encounter the following message when editing a card in Create: “Sorry, you do not have permission to make REST API requests.” If you encounter this message, try adjusting or temporarily disabling that setting so that you can edit the Create cards.

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