Old Posts Appearing on Mobile Version of my Site

[liannef]

Hi There,

I have been having issues with feedblitz not grabbing new posts recently....I reset that and now the feed is pulling normally. However, I noticed that when I access my site on a mobile device it shows that the latest post is one from March 24, 2014 (which is the same post that was previously stuck on my feedblitz feed).

I unchecked the redirect feed box on the genesis theme settings and that hasn't helped. Any ideas?

http://www.themakeupgirl.net

[AnitaC]

Looks like you have a caching plugin installed. Delete the cache and check again.

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Need help with customization or troubleshooting? Reach out to me.

[liannef]

THANK YOU!! That did it....

I only installed the caching plugin because I heard that it makes your site run faster. Is that true or is this really just unnecessary?

-Lianne

[Summer]

Putting on my old-school unix sysadmin hat here 🙂

Caching plugins do not make your website run faster. They store the data from your website in a "cache", and when visitors hit your website their browsers pull the data from the cache rather than in real time from your site. This does not make your website "run faster", not in the way a lot of people think. The downside is that if the plugin is doing its job properly, the cache is persistent, and tends to either get stuck or not update for 12 or 24 hours (or more) because it thinks it's doing you a favor.

If you have a site that you're updating more than once a day, you're not helping yourself at all, especially since the RSS feeds have their own cached info, and you add another cache on top of that when you use a third party RSS provider. Add the cherry on top of mobile providers doing their own caching on their proxy servers for their customers to save on load times and bandwidth on their end, and you can imagine the mess 🙂

I'm not a fan of caching plugins for WordPress anymore. They made more sense 8 years ago when cheap webhosting had limited resources and most people were doing their web browsing from desktops and laptops over broadband, but these days I feel they are a waste of time and cause far more problems for small to mid-size websites than they could possibly solve anymore. In that time, PHP has improved, MySQL has improved and even WordPress has improved. IMO, caching plugins become a redundant burden instead of a help in that case.

If your site is popular enough that it's generating significant traffic, you likely would have started receiving numerous database errors as a first sign of the system not being able to respond fast enough to the queries. If that's the case, then you should consider setting up with premium level hosting anyway, an ISP with load balanced redundant servers and DNS servers, and a tech support team that has someone on it who can actually tune your server and database to your specific site needs.

If there's a caching plugin that only caches images and nothing else, to save load times there if you have contributors who forget and upload 1-2Mb images instead of trimming them down for web use, I might consider that a useful tool option, otherwise, don't waste your time and save yourself a few headaches.

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WordPress / Genesis Site Design & Troubleshooting: A Touch of Summer | @SummerWebDesign
Slice of SciFi | Writers, After Dark

[AnitaC]

Thanks for that round up @Summer, I never used one before. I just started about a year ago using Quick Cache and they just seem to be a pain in the you know what. I don't have a lot of images, so I may just deactivate it to see how it goes.

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Need help with customization or troubleshooting? Reach out to me.

[Author]

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