How To Exclude Parts Of A Page From Caching In WordPress

Caching is the secret sauce that can transform a slow page into one that loads blazing fast. There are many layers of caching – you can cache on the origin server, a POP endpoint, and even the browser. Using these techniques, you can obtain cache hit ratios of over 90% on networks like Cloudflare. However, these techniques are only effective for mostly static sites. As soon as there’s a dynamic component, you have to be very careful about what you cache. However, there are ways to work around this. And today, I came across a great WordPress plugin that makes it easy to exclude certain parts of a page from caching.

Caching Dynamic Pages is a Challenge

Let’s say your page shows the latest stock price. Or even the time or date. Perhaps you have a PHP snippet that calculates the inventory stock for a product. None of these pieces of information can be cached. They must always be up-to-date – sometimes on a second-to-second basis. It’s a real shame because most of the time, you don’t want the entire page to be generated from scratch. It’s just a few elements that need to be dynamic while the rest of the page layout and text remain the same.

Fragment Caching Doesn’t Help

Plugins like W3 Total Cache have something known as “Fragment Caching”, where you can exclude certain items from the server cache. But if you use a system like Cloudflare to cache the page, fragment caching won’t help you, because Cloudflare stores the result of the server in its “Full HTML caching” functionality.

Using the Content No Cache Plugin

Recently, I came across this WordPress plugin that lets you create dynamic content that’s never cached – not even by Cloudflare when in full caching mode. It’s called Content No Cache. You can download and install it from the WordPress plugin repository.

After installation, you navigate to the “Content No Cache” section on the WordPress admin dashboard and create your dynamic content like this:

Now, of course, you could write a PHP snippet for this and insert it as a shortcode so that it computes automatically every time the page is loaded. Once you save this, you can use the provided shortcode to insert the dynamic content into a regular post/page. Like so:

And when the page renders, this is what you see:

This Even Works with Cloudflare’s “Cache Everything”

The best part about this method is that it even bypasses Cloudflare’s “Cache Everything”, which saves the HTML returned from the server. It works because the dynamic content is rendered in real-time via JavaScript instead of plain HTML. So this technique works perfectly with Cloudflare. Here’s a screenshot of the Cloudflare header status showing a “HIT” while displaying dynamic content:

For me, this is the killer feature.

Full Site Caching is Now Accessible Even for Dynamic Pages

Full site caching is the magic sauce that can make even slow web pages load instantly. Using QUIC.cloud, NameHero users can reduce their TTFB times by as much as 500%! But it’s not particularly useful if your site depends on dynamic elements. Using the Content No Cache plugin, you can now extend full site caching even for moderately dynamic sites as long as you’re able to set it up properly with PHP in the backend to get the values in real-time.

This solution beats fragment caching as implemented on server caching plugins like W3 Total Cache. So go out there and use it!