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Excluding WooCommerce Pages from Caching

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If you run a WooCommerce shop and you’re using a caching plugin on your website – or your host is providing one as a service, like Varnish – make sure caching is disabled for key WooCommerce pages and cookies.

What is Caching?

Caching is ‘saving’ website information and content in the user’s browser on their first visit and displaying that saved page in the future rather than having to pull it from the server. It allows for faster page loading than if the page had to be ‘rebuilt’ from scratch each time the user views it.

But caching has its drawbacks, as you probably know from being told to ‘clear your cache’ to try to fix any website issue. Caching impacts on WooCommerce can include:

  • Users seeing old versions of the checkout page when they try to finish an order
  • Users seeing other users’ carts or finding strange items in their carts
  • Users seeing other users’ account info
  • Issues with WooCommerce checkout pages never loading

WooCommerce logoThese problems can cause your customers to trust your site less as well as privacy issues. But it can be fixed easily by excluding dynamic pages from the cache. Note: some caching plugins automatically exclude cart and checkout pages for certain ecommerce plugins. Check your plugin’s documentation.

How to Disable Caching for WooCommerce in WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a popular commercial caching plugin for WordPress. It does automatically exclude the Cart, Checkout and Account pages automatically, but there are a few more things you need to do.

1. Go to the WP Rocket settings, Advanced Rules.

2. In the Never Cache Cookies section, add the following lines:

woocommerce_cart_hash
woocommerce_items_in_cart
wp_woocommerce_session_
woocommerce_recently_viewed
store_notice[noticeid]

3. Save the changes.

Cookies help track products in carts and power the ‘recently viewed’ widget – they need to stay dynamic as they change a lot.

This process should be simliar for different caching plugins.

How to Disable Caching for WooCommerce in Varnish

Varnish is a server-side tool that speeds up website loading as well as providing security protection. Part of its job is to temporarily store the content of your web pages (a cache), which will be served up when a user requests them rather than making a call on your host server (just like the plugin-based caches).

If you have access to the server settings, you can add the following WooCommerce exclusions to Varnish.

Pages/URLs:

\?add-to-cart=
\^/(cart|my-account/*|checkout|wc-api/*|addons|logout|lost-password|product/*|wp-admin|wp-login)
\/checkout/
\/my-account/

Cookies:

woocommerce_cart_hash
woocommerce_items_in_cart
wp_woocommerce_session_
woocommerce_recently_viewed
store_notice[notice id]

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Payments, Uptime Monitors, Popup Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

For WooCommerce users, a new payments option was announced this past week: WooCommerce Payments. This new service uses Stripe’s payment processing but with a different user experience. However, there’s one big drawback – it requires Jetpack to function. If you’re already using Jetpack to calculate taxes in WooCommerce, then it may be worth a look. If not, I’d probably stick with Stripe. Learn more about WooCommerce Payments. And, why you may want to avoid Jetpack if you can.

Looking for a service to let you know if your website goes down? Here are 12 of the best uptime monitoring services reviewed. Note: if you’re a WP Minder client, we do this for you and always have an eye on your site. Learn about all the benefits of working with us.

Popups are everywhere – they can be useful and engaging, or just terribly invasive. This post about the 5 best WordPress popup plugins also has info on how to make sure your popups are not irritating.

And a few posts from our sister site Red Kite Creative that you might find helpful:

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Clean Up Your Media Library, Remote Working Toolkit, WooCommerce Catalogs, Spamdexing

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Do you have dozens (or hundreds? Or thousands?) of images in your Media Library that you know or suspect are no longer being used? All those extra images can slow down your site, first by taking up lots of extra space on your web server, and second by making backup files huge. Fortunately, there are some fairly easy ways to identify and remove them without having to go through every image one by one. Learn about how to clean up your Media Library without too many headaches.

A timely article called Make It Remote shares work-at-home knowledge gained over a decade of managing remote teams. This is a pay-what-you-want toolkit.

If you want to use WooCommerce as a product catalog instead of a sales machine, there’s an extension for that. I used this in a client’s site last week and it’s super-easy to hide the add-to-cart functionality and replace it with custom messages or links of your own.

Finally – all about spamdexing, where websites get hacked with injected nasty keywords and links to manipulate search engine rankings for another web property designed to rip people off. You can avoid being the target of one of these hacks by keeping your site up to date, using strong passwords, and using a good security plugin properly set up to scan your site regularly.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Shipping, WordPress Comments, RSS Feeds

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and needed a way to set up shipping by weight ranges. There are commercial plugins that do this, but I found a great free one that works fine for my client’s needs. WooCommerce Weight-Based Shipping lets you add a series of rules for free shipping, subtotals, shipping destinations, all based on order weight.

Do you allow comments on your WordPress blog? Comments can be great – they can help build and tie a community of site fans together. But they can also have a dark side. If your blog comments are overrun with spam or trolls and you just want it to stop, learn how to disable comments completely, or conditionally as you see fit. This post also covers how to delete existing comments, shorten the available commenting period, and more.

If you have a blog, are you sharing that blog so people can read it elsewhere? Like an RSS reader. Here’s an interesting post about RSS feeds and whether they are ‘giving away content for free.’ I agree with the author… you want people to read your blog, right? Encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS feed is a way to help more people see your writing. And that’s a good thing.

As a followup, here’s a review of the best RSS readers and news aggregator services. If you’ve never used one, try signing up and subscribing to some feeds.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blogging Misconceptions, Tweeting for Business, WooCommerce Images, Multisite

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, and are feeling a bit intimidated, here’s something for you. Learn about two misconceptions about blogging that are 180 degrees apart. Is blogging ‘just writing’ or does it really require ‘superhuman effort?’ Turns out that neither of those views is really very accurate, and somewhere in the middle is a more reasonable conclusion.

If you use Twitter to promote your business (or want to start), what should you tweet about? Here are 21 easy ideas for business tweets. Some of these can also be good to use on other social platforms you might frequent for your business, like Facebook or LinkedIn, though the article is focused on short tweetable content.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and had some issues with gallery thumbnail image sizing. Here’s a useful and recent post containing all you may need to know about WooCommerce images. If you need a little more focus on resizing those products try this second post on changing WooCommerce image sizes.

Finally… if you have a need to run several WordPress sites on one server and would like to manage them all from a single control panel, WordPress Multisite may be for you. Here is a great and comprehensive guide to Multisite just published last month. Is your company or organization a candidate for the networking tools that Multisite provides? Maybe, if you’re:

  • A company with different departments each with their own website
  • A university or school with various departments and also student/faculty who need their own sites
  • A global or chain business where each location has its own website
  • A gym where each trainer needs their own site
  • Basically any situation where you need a network of sites under the control of one administrator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Cart Abandonment, Gutenberg, Megamenus, Member Directories

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

We’re right in the middle of the 2018 holiday season. Do you run a WooCommerce shop? Did you know that cart abandonment (people who shop on a site, put things in their cart, but never complete their purchase) is estimated at almost 70%? That’s a huge number. If you could track those people down and try to recover those sales, why wouldn’t you? Here are 4 plugins to help with WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery.

Gutenberg was due for release this week, but it’s been pushed back indefinitely. This is a good thing! Gutenberg is not yet ready for prime time for a number of reasons – that’s the feeling shared by many developers, including me – and for the time being I suggest staying with the classic WordPress editor. This is what I’m recommending to my clients and maintenance service subscribers. Here’s how to disable Gutenberg (when it goes live) and keep using Classic Editor.  If you’re a WordPress user and are not yet familiar with Gutenberg take a look at this….

If your site has a menu with a ton of items or products, and is unwieldy (lots of very long dropdowns), consider moving to a megamenu. These are great if you have lots of items, or many categories, or want to include other content such as images in your menu. Here’s a review of 8 popular megamenu plugins. My favorite of these is UberMenu. I’ve used it on a number of sites and though it’s complex, it’s not too hard to get your head around. They have good support and tutorials available.

Finally… if a member directory would be a handy tool for your community, here’s a nice walkthrough of setting up one using the Posts Table Pro plugin. A membership directory can be valuable for a large organization where you need to display contact and other information for many people. Why would you want to use a plugin rather than just typing out this info in a page? Because the directories generated by Posts Table Pro are dynamic; they can be searched, or sorted by a particular field, for example. I haven’t used this plugin, but the step by step walkthrough looks promising.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.