Caching Issues with GoDaddy
A customer has recently notified us of caching issues on their website hosted with GoDaddy. After looking into it ourselves and working with multiple plugin support teams, we have concluded it is an issue with GoDaddy servers which all Managed WordPress websites will most likely experience, regardless of their caching settings and plugins, as it seems to affect all of our customer’s Managed WordPress sites. When a change is made to a website, opening and closing the browser does not cause the changes to appear, instead the user must manually refresh the browser for the changes to take effect. This can be mitigated by editing the .htaccess file after connecting to your website via FTP.
Every site’s .htaccess file is usually a bit different and they contain import information about caching that is communicated to your browser. In there you will find all sorts of tokens and various pieces of info that determine whether your browser will use its cached version of the website or will get it fresh from the GoDaddy servers. Setting all data on the website to expire after zero seconds and uploading the modified .htaccess file will cause most browsers to always use the latest version of the website. This causes changes to appear simply by opening and closing the browser in most instances.
However, there is still an issue regarding the mobile version of Firefox specifically (it seems that the Android version is worse than the iPhone version, which seems to use the latest version after a significant amount of time) which we think is due to an issue with GoDaddy servers that we cannot mitigate. When trying to get the latest version of the site no amount of refreshing or clearing of the server-side cache will work, instead the user must clear their browser cache. We have tried this both with our additional caching plugin, WP Rocket, enabled and disabled. We were even able to temporarily disable the GoDaddy caching plugin by renaming files via FTP but the issue persisted. We have contacted GoDaddy about this on multiple occasions and were able to recreate the issue with them but their only response is to tell us to switch to their more expensive cPanel hosting rather than fix what is an obvious bug in their system. WordPress websites hosted under various other web hosts have not exhibited these issues, but GoDaddy still refuses to acknowledge this. If you or your company host your website with GoDaddy with their Managed WordPress plan, we encourage you to thoroughly test your website cache, especially with Firefox mobile. Until GoDaddy commits to solving this issue, we recommend that you find another web host provider if you are in the market for one. Please comment below if you notice similar issues on your own website in an attempt to force GoDaddy to fix their product.
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