Install and set up

Install

1. In wp-admin, go to Plugins > Add New, search for “Uruz Cache Warmer”, then click Install Now. You can also download the zip from wordpress.org/plugins/uruz-cache-warmer and upload it under Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.

2. Click Activate.

3. The setup wizard opens on its own. If it does not, open Cache Warmer in the admin menu.

The plugin adds a top-level Cache Warmer menu. Administrators and shop managers can use it.

The setup wizard

The wizard has six steps. Each step is saved when you click Continue, and Back takes you to the step before. Nothing is warmed until the last step.

1. Your site

Two addresses the warmer works from.

• Canonical domain: leave it empty unless your site answers on one particular host. Warming www.example.com and example.com fills two separate caches, so set the one you use.
• Sitemap URL: empty means <domain>/sitemap_index.xml, which is what Yoast SEO and Rank Math produce. A plain urlset works too.

Click Read the sitemap now to read it on the spot. It tells you how many URLs come out of it, after your filters. Nothing is queued yet.

2. What gets warmed

• Mobile pass: also warm the mobile copy of every URL. Recommended. It doubles the requests, not the queue.
• Personal pages: read cart, checkout and account from WooCommerce and never warm them. The pages found are listed under Excluded already.
• Archive pagination: also warm page 2, 3 and so on of categories, brands, the shop and the blog. Recommended on a store with big categories. Deepest page sets how far it goes.
• Never warm these paths: one path per line, on top of the detected ones. A path also blocks everything under it: /thank-you also blocks /thank-you/1042.
• Extra URLs: one per line, for pages that are not in the sitemap. A path like /landing-page or a full address both work.

3. Pace

How much work happens at once. Under the fields, the wizard turns your numbers into an estimate of how long one full pass over the site takes.

• Batch size: URLs per run. A run is cut off after 45 seconds, so what does not fit waits for the next run.
• Requests at a time: requests sent in parallel. Three is safe on shared hosting.
• Worker interval: minutes between runs. Batch size divided by interval is your pace per hour.
• Delay between requests: a pause after each request, in milliseconds.
• Rewarm after: hours before a warmed URL goes back in the queue. Keep it below your cache lifetime. If a full pass takes longer, the estimate says so.

4. Quiet window

Hours when nobody is shopping, in site time. Turn on Quiet window, set From and Until, and give it its own Batch size then and Requests at a time then. A window may cross midnight: 22 until 6 works.

Use it when a full pass at your daytime pace takes too long.

5. Alerts

Turn on Email alerts, set Send to (empty means the site admin address) and the Miss threshold. See Alerts.

6. Ready

A summary of what you chose: the host and sitemap, the cache buckets, the pace, the quiet window and alerts. Click Turn the warmer on. This switches the worker on and builds the queue from your sitemap straight away.

Then you can watch it work: Warm a few URLs now warms a handful of URLs in front of you, with the cache answer for each.

Note

On a first pass every URL answers MISS. That is expected: the warming request is the one that builds the page. Run it again and you should see HIT.

Starting values

The defaults are low on purpose. Raise them after a few cycles, while watching the response time on the dashboard.

Setting	Default
Batch size	15 URLs per run
Requests at a time	3
Worker interval	5 minutes
Rewarm after	12 hours
Delay between requests	250 ms
Mobile pass	On
Quiet window	Off (2 to 6 when turned on, 40 URLs a run, 6 at a time)

Running the wizard again

Every wizard setting is also on the Settings tab. To go through the steps again, for example after moving to another host, click Restart setup at the top of Settings.

Next step: cron

WP-Cron only runs when somebody visits your site. On a quiet site the warmer then runs late or not at all. Set up a real cron entry, see Cron and WP-CLI.

Uninstalling

Deleting the plugin from WordPress removes its queue table, settings, logs, scheduled events and the capability it added. Your cache is not touched.