The website security firewall has a lot of features. This includes the front end scanning and filtering of the connections; however there’s also an additional CDN aspect that helps with page loading.
What is a CDN? Content Distribution Network. Copies of your site get stored on a network of satellite servers for faster loading and distribution globally.
This is supposed to help. However this can cause some issues with the responsiveness of your updates…. When you push a change to your content it’ll take forever to show up live.
This is the robust and capable server caching is causing a delay in your new files to manifest in real time. It’s frustrating and you need this to improve.
You need to log into the account with the website security firewall. For our example we will be using the Sucuri product.
Go to the Firewall SETTINGS tab > PERFORMANCE > CLEAR CACHE
This will prompt the firewall caching to clear and rebuild the snapshot of your current site files.
What if I don’t want to have the firewall and CDN cache my site?
Then you need to adjust the caching level. This changes the rules for what files the firewall will hold onto and for how long.
Go to SETTINGS > PERFORMANCE > CACHING LEVEL
This will change how helpful the firewall caching is in distributing copies of your site.
What if I want to manually clear my firewall cache without logging in?
This is the solution I use and suggest for web developers. Leave the standard full caching level on the firewall.
Go to: SETTINGS > API > CLEAR CACHE (WAF API V1)
When you click the button for the “Clear Cache (WAF API v1)” button it will open up a new tab with a link showing a sucuri WAF url. This link is what you need to save or bookmark. It’s a unique URL assigned to your firewall and every time it’s loaded… your cache is cleared.
Because the firewall caching isn’t able to be hacked or exploited, and the public link is just a command to clear the old file set… this can be shared with your web dev or client. You can’t break it, you cant hack it.
Just build into your work flow process that when you’re done making changes or updates to the site and you want to see your changes live, you can just load that public WAF link and it’ll clear the old file set and you should see your new edits manifest live.