Warm Cache

by ramon fincken

Description

Crawls your website-pages based on any XML sitemap. If you have a caching plugin this will keep your cache warm.
Speeds up your site.
Compatible with following elements: < sitemap > < url >
All urls in your sitemap will be visited by the plugin to keep the cache up to date.
Will show average page load times and pages visited.

Needs google XML sitemap to read the generated XML file.
Needs a cronjob (wget or curl) to call the plugin. You need to setup the cronjob yourself! (Or ask your sysadmin to help you).
* Coding by: MijnPress.nl Mastodon profile More plugins
* Crawl script idea by http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/johnny/2006/09/17/handling-the-digg-effect-with-wordpress-caching/

Installation

Upload directory warm-cache to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Visit Plugins menu to view your Warm cache options.
Run a cronjob. See the menu for the cronjob URL.
Run it as often as you like, preferably more often then your
page cache expiration time.
Example: Page cache expiration = 1 hour, so set your cronjob at 30 minutes.

Set it higher when you have lots of pages

Screenshots

Details Fullscreen Screenshot 1
Overview Fullscreen Screenshot 2

Faq

I have a BIG sitemap that takes over 5 seconds to load

use a filter called ‘http_request_timeout’

I have multiple (language / domain) sitemaps, but I can only add one sitemap!

Use a sitemap index, pointing to all your (custom/sub)-sitemaps. Only add the sitemap main index file to the plugin. Do NOT have this in the custom file name:
warmcache-sitemap.xml OR warmcache. Use this for example: supersitemap.xml or my_cache_sitemap.xml

How to disable logging completely (for very large sites)?

Set a define in your wp-config (at the top, newline, after <?php ) with name MP_WARM_CACHE_NO_LOGGING_AT_ALL and value “yes”
Example
Please check https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/warm-cache/trunk/readme.txt#L38 DO not copy directly below due to the “curly quotes”
define(‘MP_WARM_CACHE_NO_LOGGING_AT_ALL’, ‘yes’);

How to run a cronjob?

Ask your webhost how to set up a get call using wget or curl. See Installation for instructions howmany times you should call the cronjob.

The plugin shows an error, it cannot read the XML sitemap

The fact that you are able to “see” the XML in your browser does not guarantee that PHP is able to read it too.

Consult your host about this, if that fails.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/error-with-google-xml-sitemaps/

Sucuri / Audit log notifies about new posts beeing created

We use the hidden post type warmcache to store statistics. We also remove them upon each crawl.
Feel free to ignore creation of posts with warmcache.
See https://wordpress.org/support/topic/29-september-2016-update-causing-constant-post-update-notifications-from-secur/

I have set up the cronjob but the stats table on the plugin page remains empty.

@see The plugin shows an error, it cannot read the XML sitemap

How to override the 20 pages crawl limit

Set a define in your wp-config (at the top, newline, after <?php ) with name MP_WARM_CACHE_FILTER_LIMIT and value INTEGER
Example
Please check https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/warm-cache/trunk/readme.txt#L58 DO not copy directly below due to the “curly quotes”
define(‘MP_WARM_CACHE_FILTER_LIMIT’, 25);

I have a lot of questions and I want support where can I go?

The support forums over here, drop me a toot to notify me of your support topic over here.
I always check my toots, so mention my name with https://mastodon.social/@ramonfincken and your problem.

Reviews

Works as it should. Great work!

By Marasligil on June 15, 2023

5 Stars

Works!

By mapdi on November 2, 2022

Works very well. Thanks a lot!

Completely unreliable!

By leomp203 on December 1, 2021

Cannot do anything with it! Don't waste your time! The idea is very good, unfortunately it is very underdeveloped and full of bugs.

Not for LSCache plugin

By egocefalo on September 15, 2021

Litespeed cache plugin has it's own crawler but a2hosting shared disable litespeed crawlers, this plugin it's still working and the log states it visits all urls on the sitemap by batches of 20 pages. But anyway LSCache still give misses on the Warm Cache crawled urls/pages, so it's not good for that cache plugin. It's not warm cache plugin's fault since it surely do what it says it does, it crawls. Thank you!

Very Handy

By cunnningstunts on August 24, 2019

My cache plugin has a crawler built in, but it can't be enabled on our server for reasons. So this plugin is a great alternative. Thank you!

Working

By Anonymous User 16833488 (anonymized_16833488) on June 9, 2019

Work great with cache enabler, but its possible to add only one sitemap, if it were possible to add others would be much better

easy to use plugin

By Harvinder Singh Sharry (sufi punjabi shayar) on November 20, 2018

This plugin helps me to set up a warm cache in just 5 minutes. Easy to use if you now hoe what is warm cache and understand your hosting environment.

Does the job perfectly

By farvavadfbdafv (inabizzel) on September 15, 2018

After setting up a cron once every 5 minutes the plugin works exactly as intended. It even creates a list of each page it reads so you can make sure it is reading the xml correctly. Thank you to the developer for an excellent little plugin.

First it was broken, now its awesome

By ernstveen on September 10, 2018

Thanks to the author it works pretty cool now. My Google Page Speed is 100! Thanks, cool plugin.

Great plugin!! Does exactly what it says it does.

By Tamhas (tamhas) on May 28, 2018

Very happy with this plugin! Yes, it would be a pain for people who don't know how to set a cron job, UNLESS they used easycron.com as the author says, or cron-job.org, which is FREE and easy ... in which case it will do EXACTLY what they want. Thanks.

Changelog

4.1.1

Bugfix: PHP fatal for _ vs __

4.1.0

Added: merge 3.1.0 and 4.0.0 to account for the PHP fatal countable

4.0.0

Bugfix: PHP fatal on countable in the crawler

3.1.0

Added: Tranlations
Added: Link to autowarmcache.com

3.0.0

Bugfix: PHP static notice

2.2.3

Added: Complete rewrite of the crawler, better compatibility with W3TC (permalink)
Bugfix: Statistics
Bugfix: PHP static notice

2.2.2

Bugfix: Fixed skipping the first item in sitemap(s). Thanks Jeff (@upekshapriya) for reporting
Added: simplexml_load_string function check

2.2.1

Bugfix: PHP notices

2.2

Added: Option to disable logging completely (for very large sites) see FAQ how to do so

2.1

Bugfix: No gzip compression in ob_start filter
Bugfix: Devision by zero fixed in wp-admin statistics page
Changed: Added lock transient to prevent multiple warm cache calls. You can now call the warm cache every minute 🙂
Added: Override of 20 pages crawl limit via define. See the FAQ on WordPress.org how to do that.

2.0.1

Bugfix: The crawl key was re-set on every view of the admin page
Changed: Caching of results of XML sitemap check is now active

2.0

Added: Staggered crawl, so if you have thousands of posts, the crawl will walk/slide over those posts in groups of 20 each
Changed: Deleted all transient options, in favour of custom post type warmcache storage

1.9.4

Added: Debug notices when a sitemap is incorrect

1.9.3

Needs re-work: Bugfix: Transients without expiration (if you have no external non-persistant storage your options table will grow), Props M. Bastian

1.9.2

Added: Toggle flush settings

1.9.1

Added: Transient check for correct syntax of sitemap
Added: Admin notices when sitemap is not present or currupt

1.9

Changed: Better handling of pre-checks
Changed: Changed API key change message

1.8.1

Added: Flush to prevent loadbalancer/proxy timeout see https://wordpress.org/support/topic/needs-flush-to-write-buffers-to-prevent-timeouts

1.8

Added: Sitemap url override
Changed: Info txt in plugin
Changed: Refresh random token
Added: Cron service link

1.7

Bugfix: Extra if/else for zero pages to fix x/0 errors. Thanks to khromov https://wordpress.org/support/topic/division-by-zero-2 https://wordpress.org/support/profile/khromov

1.6

Added: Support for sub-sitemaps using < sitemap > format (as used in Beta of Google XML sitemaps). Thanks to Pascal90.de!

1.1.2

Changed: Random password call as mentioned by swanzai https://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-warm-cache-how-to-call-this-plugin-correctly

1.1

First release