Have you noticed your sign-ups not showing up on the sheet after they are submitted? Chances are, this is due to caching.
The Sign-up Sheets plugin doesn’t add any kind of caching, but if it’s in place on your site through a different plugin or other service or configuration, it can potentially cause this situation.
What is caching?
Caching is the process of storing a copy of a page or asset so it can be more quickly accessed next time. It’s used to improve the performance of a site (i.e. the speed at which a page loads).
Caching can be setup in a number of different ways you can have multiple types of caching on your site. With WordPress, one of the most common methods is by installing a caching plugin
Sign-up Sheets and Caching
The Sign-up Sheets plugin supports a number of caching plugins, but if you have any issues or are using a plugin that is not currently supported, one workaround you can use is to disable caching on pages that use the [sign_up_sheet] shortcode and /sheet/* pages. By doing this, these pages would never be cached so should always displaying the most updated results. The downside is that you lose any performance benefit the caching would provide.
The caching plugins currently supported by Sign-up Sheets are…
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- WP-Optimize
- LiteSpeed Cache (support added as of version 2.2.2)
- WP Fastest Cache (support added as of version 2.2.10)
- Breeze (support added as of version 2.2.12)
If you are using a caching plugin that is not listed above, please contact us to request that support be added for the one you are using. Once supported you shouldn’t need to disable caching on your sheet pages and they should just update only when needed.
Clear Cache by Post ID After Sign-up
There is also a setting in the plugin allowing you force the cache to be flushed on specific post IDs anytime a sign-up occurs (as of version 2.2.14). You don’t need to worry about this for your automatically generated sheet posts since it’s handled out of the box, but if you add a shortcode to other posts, you may want to use this feature if you notice that the data is not updated on those posts after a sign-up changes.
Learn more about this at Settings: Clear Cache for these Post IDs when a sign-up is added or removed