For the most part using various WordPress cache plugins can lead to faster load times on various content — especially if it hasn’t been changed. However…

Ever viewed a website that didn’t display correctly till you cleared your browser cache?

In the same way, sometimes changes to pages, menu structures, or other things can become bugged out in WordPress’ cache. It can cause weird issues that don’t seem to make any sense, and confirming settings on one page but not seeing it take hold anywhere can even seem like WordPress itself is corrupted.

Today, for example, we were working with some photo galleries and needed to rename a particular gallery. That caused the entire album to refuse to load and seemed to domino into all the album’s other galleries. After 25 minutes of cursing, it occurred to me to try purging the WordPress cache. Boom – everything was happy.

Even settings like “disable WordPress cache for admins logged in” don’t always really prevent it. Admittedly I have rarely had issues using cache plugins, but today’s little excursion proved noteworthy.