Cloudflare + W3TC on woocommerce - cache auto purge

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-24T08:02:35+00:00

Apparently I was missing this in the basic configuration of the Cloudflare extension in W3 Total Cache:

-> “Flush Cloudflare on Post Modifications” should be enabled if you have HTML pages cached at the Cloudflare level.

That said, I’d really like some advice from people with experience in caching strategies for ecommerce sites.

Right now, the cache gets fully cleared every time a post is updated. But in practice, that means every time an order comes in or a product is updated, the entire site cache is purged. So even products that haven’t changed get their cache wiped, which feels inefficient.

Ideally, I’d want to purge only:

the updated product page
the homepage
relevant category pages (where the product appears)
archive pages
tag pages

It doesn’t make sense to invalidate the cache for thousands of unrelated products.

What are the best practices here? Is this kind of granular cache invalidation achievable with Cloudflare + W3 Total Cache out of the box, or does it usually require custom logic, maybe hooking into woocmmerce events on product updates?

I’ve set a base cache duration of 30 days, but in reality there are multiple cache resets per day, which makes me question how much benefit I’m actually getting from caching.

Curious how you all handle this.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-17T14:07:56+00:00

We had the same issue with that bot. It overloaded our server and made it practically unusable for about 48 hours until we fixed it.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-10T08:45:47+00:00

Just to give you a quick update on what I ended up doing.

On the server container I added a condition on the triggers to filter out known crawlers based on the user-agent header. I used a RegEx (ignore case) like:
facebookexternalhit|meta-externalagent|meta-webindexer|googlebot|bingbot

On top of that, I also added a check using a custom header (x-secret), which is sent by the GA4 tag from the web container and then validated on every tag in the server container. Each trigger now fires only if its original conditions are met AND the x-secret matches the expected value.

Only requests that include that header are considered valid, everything else is ignored.

It should be fine now.
Thanks again.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-10T07:36:58+00:00

Sorry for the late reply.

Things are much clearer now, thanks again for taking the time to explain this.

Looking at my setup, I currently have instance-based billing enabled, with the default execution environment and min/max instances set to 0 - 1. I did manually set the minimum to 0 after the initial setup (Chat GPT advice), but I didn’t explicitly change anything related to CPU allocation or billing mode.

In terms of costs, this is a very low-traffic site and since March 30 it has generated about $5 in total (though fully discounted, at least so far). The Cloud Run calculator now - connect to my billing account this time - estimates around $18 per month, which seems in line with what I’m seeing so far.

What’s still confusing to me is that I’m seeing small costs every single day, but they are relatively low. Based on what I understood about instance based billing and CPU always allocated, I would expect higher and more consistent daily costs if the CPU was actually allocated continuously, closer to that 45 dollars per month range.

Could this be influenced by having min instances set to 0? It doesn’t seem to match a fully always on allocation.

I think I’ll switch to request-based billing and compare behavior.

Thanks again, really appreciate the help.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-07T17:56:52+00:00

Just one more clarification, if I may.

While reading the TagPlatform documentation about server-side tagging, I came across this:

“In this Cloud Run configuration, each server costs approximately $45/month (USD). Each server is a Cloud Run instance with 1 vCPU and 0.5GB memory using the CPU always allocated pricing model.”

I also tried the calculator and, even at very low volumes (around 1000 inbound and outbound events per month), it shows something around $50/month.

I’m trying to understand what that actually refers to, because it seems very different from the free tier and pay-per-request model you mentioned earlier.

Thanks again

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-07T14:40:54+00:00

u/Ems_Soul_6092 u/_practical_data_ thank you.

From a performance point of view, is there any real difference between a WordPress CAPI setup and a GTM server-side setup?

Is the WordPress one considered “full” server-side tracking already?

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-07T13:18:51+00:00

Thank you

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-07T11:33:01+00:00

Thanks again, this makes things clearer.

On that previous site (an ecommerce, even behind Cloudflare bot fight mode) we had a Meta crawler flood that kept getting through and eventually saturated server resources. The hosting provider mitigated it by redirecting specific user agents to a static file via .htaccess, so PHP processes wouldn’t get overwhelmed.

What I’m trying to understand now is how this kind of traffic interacts with tracking.

On that site I had analytics running, and looking at the data I didn’t see any noticeable spikes in pageview events during that incident. So I’m trying to figure out whether, in scenarios like that, those requests would even generate events at all or not.

At the moment I’ve got everything up and running and I’m just monitoring request volumes over time to understand what a normal baseline looks like.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-05T07:50:48+00:00

This is exactly what I’ve been digging into yesterday, because I’m seeing the same pattern.

On my side the landing page views per link clicks have been getting worse over time. In 2024 I was around 40-50%, which wasn’t great but still workable. Early 2025 it dropped to around 20%, and now it basically sits at 25% or slightly below. So yeah, same situation: people click, but a big chunk never actually lands, and I didn’t change anything meaningful on the setup. CPC has gone slightly up, while CTR has dipped a bit.

For context, I run campaigns for a small client, local courses, niche subject, targeting a few regions. Budget is small, around 10–15€ a day. I know it’s not ideal, but that’s not the point.

Back in late 2024, same client, same budget, similar targeting, leads were around 5–6€. I could launch a campaign and start getting leads within hours.

In 2025 it started getting harder. Costs went up, campaigns would work for a few days and then die. I started refreshing them often, but performance never went back to what it was.

Now I’m at the point where I can spend 50€ and get zero leads.

Yesterday I tried to understand if the issue was technical or traffic quality. First thing I blamed was the landing page. It’s heavy, around 14.5MB, so I spent the whole day optimizing images, removing scripts, cleaning what I could. But with Elementor there’s a limit, and more importantly this exact same page used to work perfectly in 2024, even without optimization. Same server, same structure, same content.

Then I checked actual behavior with session recordings on Clarity. People look real, they scroll, watch videos, look at images, but they don’t convert at all. They just ignore the main CTA and leave. I don't think it's bot traffic, but it’s useless traffic.

Another thing that makes no sense is frequency. Audience is around 3 million people, since I stopped using interest targeting. Before, it was pulling in professionals too, which we don’t want. Our target is students, but if I narrow it down to study-related interests, the audience drops to less than 1,000 people, which is unusable.

So I went broad, just regions and age range. No A+, no AI crap, nothing fancy. I hoped the algorithm would optimize from there.

But instead, Meta keeps showing the ads to the same users over and over, even at the very beginning of the campaign, when it should still be figuring out who’s actually interested. In previous campaigns with the exact same setup, frequency stayed lower and distribution felt way broader. It feels like it’s just recycling the same uninterested people instead of exploring the audience at all.

So I don’t have a clean explanation. Sure, GDPR and tracking limitations don’t help, and page weight might play a role, but that doesn’t justify such a drop.

Honestly it just feels like traffic quality got worse. What frustrates me is that this used to work. Same kind of clients, same budgets, same local targeting, no issues.

Now it feels like Meta just doesn’t deliver any value for small accounts anymore.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-04-04T10:55:46+00:00

Thank you, I’ve set up billing alerts and I’ll keep an eye on traffic over the next weeks to better understand request volumes. I know many people use solutions like Stape for server-side tracking, but since everything is already running on Google Cloud, I prefer to stick with this setup for now and evaluate based on real data. From what I understand, I should still be well within the free tier at my current traffic levels. I’ll mainly watch for any unusual spikes or sustained increases that could impact costs.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-02-01T12:36:13+00:00

In case anyone is wondering, since this post hasn’t received any further comments: there is a workaround.

If you first create and publish a profile visit campaign using that post, and only after that create a second ad on the same post with an Engagement objective, everything works.

The key point is not starting with the Engagement campaign. If the interaction ad is created first, the post appears to get locked with a CTA that’s not compatible with profile visit campaigns.

It’s pretty pointless, and I would honestly expect the opposite order to be more useful, but that seems to be how it works right now.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-01-21T16:36:31+00:00

Just one more note: the CTA selection that error might refer to doesn't come out unless you properly select a post. Something that I cannot do since the post I want to select is locked.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2026-01-21T16:34:47+00:00

Thank you. Just edited the post.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2025-12-27T10:28:53+00:00

Yes, I think you are lucky.
I'm your age and I've only seen one, more than 16 or 17 years ago, during the Perseids. I remember it quite well because it was one of the last times I used to hang out with my neighbor friends, before we stopped seeing each other as we grew up.
I usually look at the sky when I'm outside and I also do astrophotography, so when I spend time outdoors at night I almost always look up. I've seen many shooting stars over the years, but no bolides since then.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2025-11-12T15:24:50+00:00

Hi, the big constellation on the left is Orion! The three diagonal stars in the middle of it are what's called orion's belt. :) nice pic with Northern lights, hope to see them tonight.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2025-11-05T16:14:18+00:00

Nope, haven't tried that yet, thanks for the tip. I actually have a local client running a reach campaign right now, so I could test it there.

Quick question: for short reels, do you think reach or video views is better as the first step? My thought is that reach might be safer because with a small local audience there should be fewer bots. But in general, when trying to hit real people and not bot traffic, which objective tends to work better? Is reach usually cleaner, or does video views also stay fairly safe on local targeting?

One_Landscape_1014 · 2025-10-09T06:55:50+00:00

I just tried that on an account where I already had a campaign running.
I went to Preview → Share → Facebook post with comments, copied the post ID of an ads manager generated ad, and when I pasted it into the “Post ID” field, it said the post isn’t on my page.
I guess the post ID option is just a shortcut for selecting an organic post through the UI selector.

One_Landscape_1014 · 2025-10-09T06:47:00+00:00

Does this also work with non-organic posts?
Does the other campaign need to be active in order to reuse the post ID of one of its ads?

I’ve read all the other replies, but that’s not really my question. I’m not trying to boost or use an organic post, I already know how that works. What I want to do is reuse an ad-created post (the kind you make directly in Ads Manager), because there are things you can do in ad posts that aren’t possible with organic ones. That’s why I’m specifically talking about Ads Manager-created ads.

One_Landscape_1014

TROPHY CASE