Cache-Control vs Fresh Forms for Gravity

Good caching policies is one of performance’s best friends, and it can be your new best friend too. Get friendly with intermediary and browser caches by taking control over your WordPress powered website’s HTTP Cache-Control headers. This is not a caching plugin in itself, but will enable you to leverage existing standard compliant caching systems better. You can set different policies for different kinds of pages to suite your website’s needs. The Cache-Control for WordPress plugin allows you to set different policies for shared/intermediary and private caches. The plugin sets some sensible defaults for a medium traffic blog that publishes an update or two per week. You can safely set long Cache-Control times as the max-age values is lowered automatically before a scheduled post is about to be published. Private pages (logged in users, the admin interface, etc.) will not be cached. The plugin has extensive documentation.

Caching is great for scenarios where your post or page content it’s not changed frequently, but if you have a form embedded to which you do changes very often or you’re using dynamic code, that doesn’t run for a cached page, or using third-party solutions relaying in dynamic live data (e.g. reCAPTCHA), using caching in these cases is going to cause issues. The same applies to certain automatic JS optimizations done by caching plugins that are known to break JS execution easily. An easy solution is to configure your caching plugin or proxy to exclude the page where the form is embedded, but you need also to remember this when you create a new page or embed a new form in an existing page… This plugin will take care of the above automatically doing the following: Flush current cache on plugin activation. This is required in order to allow the next step to run. Dynamically check if there’s a Gravity Forms for any of the supported embedding methods (see below for the list). If so, it will prevent post/page from being cached by any of the supported caching plugins, browsers and CDN/Proxies. Embedding methods supported: WordPress default editor, shortcode or Gutenberg block. Content of any post type, including pages and custom posts. ACF fields of type Text, Text Area, and WYSIWYG. Disabled by default. Avada. The following elements has been proven to work: Content Boxes, “Gravity Form”, Modal, Text Block. Other elements could work too, but not tested. Beaver Builder. It will detect Gravity Forms shortcodes added to a Text Editor module. Conversational Forms add-on. It will automatically detect any form page using the conversational_form post type (requires Conversational Forms add-on 1.3.0+). Divi. It should work with any of the default modules where you can insert a GF shortcode into the content. e.g. Call To Action, Text, Tabs… Elementor. The following widgets added to the post content are supported: Shortcode, Text. Essential Addons for Elementor Gravity Forms widget. GravityKit Gravity Forms Widget for Elementor. PowerPack for Beaver Builder Gravity Forms Styler module. Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder Gravity Forms Styler module. Ultimate Addons for Elementor By Brainstorm Force. WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons by Lucas Stark. WPBakery Page Builder. The following elements has been proven to work: “Gravity Form”, Text Block. Other elements could work too, but not tested. WP Tools Gravity Forms Divi Module. If you’re not using any of the above embedding methods you can still use Fresh Forms with a filter to pass the ID number of the posts where you want to run Fresh forms. You can also make Fresh Forms to add a cookie when a form is detected to use this cookie as a way to skip caching for hosts using Varnish based caching. Please see FAQ for more details. There’s no options page. Only the plugin version is saved to the database to be able to handle actions after an update when needed, no other data is stored. It should work with any caching plugin with support for DONOTCACHEPAGE constant, and proxies respecting the use Cache-Control HTTP header. Caching and Optimization plugins supported: Autoptimize Cache Enabler Comet Cache Hummingbird Kinsta Cache LiteSpeed Cache Page Optimize (Script concatenation only) Perfmatters (Delay JS exclusions only) Speed Optimizer (by SiteGround, the plugin with more name changes in the history of WordPress!) Surge W3 Total Cache WP Engine System WP Fastest Cache WP Optimize WP Rocket WP Super Cache Caching plugins NOT supported: Breeze. It doesn’t support DONOTCACHEPAGE constant or filters to skip caching. Check FAQ for a workaround. NitroPack. It doesn’t support DONOTCACHEPAGE constant or filters to skip caching. Check FAQ for a workaround. Cloudflare and other CDN/proxies: This plugin will add appropriate HTTP header to pages with a Gravity Forms form to exlude the page HTML from caching when the web host setup allows it. By default Cloudflare doesn’t cache the page HTML, it does only when you have configured it to “Cache Everything”. In this case, after activating the plugin, you need to purge cache in your Cloudflare account or wait for cache expiration to let Cloudflare know the page must be excluded from caching. Certain hosts like WP Engine and Kinsta don’t allow HTTP headers modification from WordPress side of things, therefore Cloudflare support will not work for these hosts. Other proxy services should work in a similar way, but I don’t have access to test any other proxy service. Feel to reach me if you want to provide me access to add support for your proxy service (documentation for the proxy would be required). Note for these cases (caching is done by an external service), Fresh Forms can just include the HTTP header when your web host allows it. Once the header is added, it’s up to the CDN/proxy being used to obey the header and skip caching for the page. Requirements PHP 7.0 or higher. WordPress 4.9 or higher. Gravity Forms 2.3 or higher. Only forms embedded using classic editor shortcode or Gutenberg block are supported. Usage Just install and activate. No settings required except for ACF support (see FAQ).