How Cache Purge Helps Keep Your Website Content Fresh and Responsive

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) accelerate web traffic across the internet through servers residing in strategic locations (known as points of presence or PoPs) across the globe. Each PoP has a number of caching servers, each of which contains a cached version of your website or application. By bringing content closer to each visitor, CDNs improve performance and reduce load on the origin server – caching is the raison d’etre for CDNs. The reason for this is a CDN’s effectiveness can be measured by the cache hit ratio, which is the percentage of requests the CDN was able to serve out of its own cache. The higher the caching ratio, the better your website or application performance. CDNs typically cache static files, such as images, JavaScript files and CSS. This type of content rarely changes and can be heavily cached. What is Cache Purge? While response and fast load times are crucial for users, the freshness (or accuracy) of your content is no less important for your business reputation. Caches are refreshed based on the caching policies each website defines, which determine the amount of time a given resource remains in the cache. When that duration expires, the content must be retrieved from the origin server. If the content in the origin server has changed, the new version will be uploaded to the cache. In certain situations, however, you may not want to wait for the caching period to expire. An example of this would be an update on your website’s pricing page or a…Read More