🗑️ How to Clear Your Site Cache After Making Changes in Search Atlas OTTO
When OTTO deploys or removes content on your website, those changes do not always appear immediately for visitors. Your site's cache stores older versions of your pages and serves them to users until the cache is refreshed. Clearing your cache is a required step any time you disengage OTTO, update injected content, or troubleshoot unexpected content appearing on your site.
🤔 Why Cache Clearing Matters After OTTO Changes
OTTO pushes content changes at the server and application level. However, caching layers — whether at the WordPress plugin level, the CDN level, or the hosting level — capture snapshots of your pages and continue serving those snapshots even after the underlying content has changed.
⚠️ If you skip this step, visitors (and you) may continue to see old injected content even after OTTO has been disengaged and the body text field has been cleared. Always clear cache immediately after making changes in OTTO to confirm the fix is live.
🛠️ How to Clear Your Cache by Platform
⚡ WordPress Caching Plugins
✅ WP Rocket: Log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings → WP Rocket, and click the Clear Cache button at the top of the screen. You can also clear cache directly from the WordPress admin toolbar by clicking the WP Rocket icon.
✅ LiteSpeed Cache: In your WordPress dashboard, navigate to LiteSpeed Cache → Toolbox → Clean All. This purges all cached files stored by LiteSpeed on your server.
✅ W3 Total Cache: Go to Performance → Dashboard and click Empty All Caches. If you use a CDN integration within W3 Total Cache, also purge the CDN cache from the same dashboard.
✅ WP Super Cache: Navigate to Settings → WP Super Cache and click Delete Cache under the Easy tab.
🌐 Cloudflare CDN
✅ Log in to your Cloudflare account and select the domain you are working with.
✅ In the left-hand sidebar, go to Caching → Configuration.
✅ Under the Custom Purge or Purge Cache section, click Purge Everything to clear all cached assets across Cloudflare's global network.
⚠️ Important: Purging everything in Cloudflare clears all cached assets site-wide. This is the safest option when troubleshooting OTTO content injection issues, as partial purges may miss the affected pages.
🖥️ Hosting-Level Cache
Many managed WordPress hosts — including WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel, SiteGround, and Cloudways — maintain their own server-side caching layers that operate independently of any WordPress plugin.
✅ WP Engine: In your WP Engine User Portal, go to your environment and click Purge All Caches.
✅ Kinsta: In the MyKinsta dashboard, navigate to your site, go to Tools, and click Clear Cache.
✅ SiteGround: In the SiteGround Site Tools, go to Speed → Caching and click the flush icon next to Dynamic Cache.
✅ Cloudways: In your Cloudways console, open your application and go to Application Management → Varnish. Click Purge Varnish Cache.
✅ Other hosts: If your host is not listed above, log in to your hosting control panel or contact your host's support team and ask them to flush the server-side or full-page cache for your domain.
✅ How to Confirm the Cache Has Been Cleared
✅ After purging your cache, open a new private or incognito browser window. This prevents your own browser cache from serving a stale version of the page.
✅ Navigate to several pages on your site — including the homepage, a category page, and an inner page — and scroll to the bottom of each.
✅ If the previously injected content no longer appears below the footer, the cache has been cleared successfully and the OTTO change is live.
⚠️ If the content is still visible after clearing all cache layers, contact Search Atlas support. A specialist can confirm whether the OTTO deployment rollback has been applied on the server side and push an additional correction if needed.
🔁 When Else Should You Clear Cache with OTTO?
🔄 Any time you engage or disengage OTTO on a site, clear your cache afterwards to ensure the changes propagate immediately to all visitors.
🔄 After editing content in any OTTO tab — including title tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, or the Miscellaneous body text field — clear your cache so updated deployments are reflected live.
🔄 After completing a troubleshooting session with Search Atlas support involving OTTO deployments, always perform a full cache purge as the final step before confirming the issue is resolved.