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How to Manage Your Cache
Nostra keeps a lightning-fast snapshot of your pages at the edge — and clears it automatically when your store changes. This guide covers how that works, when to clear your cache manually, and how to fine-tune cache durations in the Manage section of the portal.
How Caching Works
Think of your website's cache as a snapshot of your pages, captured at a moment in time and served to visitors instantly from the edge. That snapshot is what makes your site fast — but if you change something on your site, the snapshot can fall out of date.
Nostra's Edge Delivery Engine is designed to prevent that from ever affecting your shoppers. No one should see an old price or a sold-out product — so when your store changes, your cache clears.
By default, your cache clears itself. Nostra automatically refreshes your cache after major changes to your store — you only need to step in for a handful of specific situations, covered below.
Automatic Cache Clearing
From the moment your store is onboarded, Nostra watches for site changes — via a Shopify webhook installed during onboarding, or via polling for Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores — and clears the affected cache in real time.
Automated clearings cover five categories:
- Product updates — title updates, image changes, description edits, and more
- Collection updates — adding or deleting a collection, or adding or removing products within one
- Inventory changes — quantity increases or decreases that take an item in or out of stock
- New theme publications — themes your customers will actually see (development and demo themes don't trigger clearings)
- Theme updates — such as a new version release or bug fix of an official Shopify theme
Our system reviews the changes sent through Shopify's category-specific webhook payloads and compares them against your store's previous data fields. If any tracked field is different, a cache clearing is triggered — across your entire site or for the individual pages affected, depending on the context.
Theme changes trigger an automated clearing, but contact support when you make them — Nostra may need to adjust your store's configuration so your site continues to work seamlessly with the Edge Delivery Engine.
When to Clear Manually
Automation covers the big changes, but there are still moments when you'll want to clear your cache yourself:
After minor but crucial changes
Small adjustments that don't trigger the automated system, but that you want visitors to see right away.
After changing static theme elements
Static elements stay fixed and don't change based on a visitor's interaction — think text blocks, banners, and layout.
After changing cosmetic cart features
Visual tweaks to how your cart looks (for functional cart changes, see When to Contact Support).
After plugin or theme adjustments
If you've tweaked settings, added code, or made other minor changes to plugins or themes, clear the cache to keep content current.
After theme revisions in a duplicated theme
Edits made within a duplication of your theme won't always trigger automation.
When your website appears unusual
If sections of your site seem off or out of place, an outdated cache may be the cause. A manual clearing can get things back on track.
How to Clear Your Cache
Everything lives in the Manage section of the portal at app.nostra.ai. From there you can:
Clear a specific page
Target a single URL path — refresh one blog post or product page without touching the rest of your site.
Clear your entire site
Refresh everything at once — practical when you've made changes across many pages.
Schedule & recur
Queue a clearing for a specific time, or set up a recurring series for predictable updates.
View your history
See who cleared what and when — including Nostra's automated clearings.
Single page or entire site?
Keeping content cached for as long as possible is what makes your site fast, so the less you clear, the better. If you've made a small static change to one blog post, there's no need to refresh your whole store — clear just that page and leave the rest of your cache working.
Clearing by single page is especially useful if you regularly update text content, banners, alerts, or sales on specific pages — particularly your homepage. Our site speed experts recommend this targeted approach whenever possible to maximize cache efficiency and delivery speed. When you've changed many pages at once, a full-site clearing is the more practical choice.
Cache-clearing features require Nostra to be enabled for your store. If the Edge Delivery Engine is set to "off," you can't clear your cache — the portal will show an alert to remind you.
Single Page Clearings
Whether you select a single page or a saved favorite, you clear a specific page using its URL path. The interface automatically extracts the path from any full URL you enter — paste https://example.com/products/example-hat and the system uses just /products/example-hat.
Single page clearing requires an exact path match. Entering /products/ will not clear pages like /products/example-shirt. To manage many pages that share a common prefix, use custom cache durations instead — those do support prefix matching.
Scheduling & Recurring Series
Clear now, or schedule for later
Choosing to clear now puts your store straight into the cache-clearing queue. Prefer to plan ahead? Schedule a clearing for a specific time. Either way, your request shows as pending until the job completes — usually within a few minutes — after which it appears in your cache history.
Recurring series
Clearing a specific page's cache on a regular schedule is especially helpful for stores that make predictable changes to certain products or pages but not to others. A recurring series works exactly like a regular clearing — applied to a specific path or your entire site — with your first job entering the queue at the start date and time you choose, repeating until your end date or until you cancel the series.
Cache History
The history tab shows up to 100 of your previous cache clearings. For each request you can see who made it, when it entered the queue (in your local timezone), and whether it covered your entire site or specific pages.
By default, the view shows clearings initiated by portal users or API calls. To see Nostra's automated clearings too, use the dropdown to select System Automation or All — the table updates to match your selection.
Custom Cache Durations
Cache duration is how long a page's content stays stored in the cache before it's refreshed from your server. Longer durations mean faster delivery and lower server load; shorter durations mean fresher content on pages that change often. Getting this balance right matters most for large, international sites, because your cache is managed across several layers:
Each URL path can carry its own duration.
Stores serving multiple currencies cache each variant.
Every edge server location holds its own copy.
Nostra assigns your store an intelligent default duration that optimizes the majority of your pages. Customization is worth considering if your store regularly updates banners, alerts, and sales on specific pages, receives a high amount of international traffic, or uses several currencies.
The result is the best of both worlds: longstanding content runs on your store's default, while rapidly changing pages — say, a homepage on a 10-minute duration — stay fresh no matter how often you edit them.
How to set a custom duration
Go to Manage → Cache Settings in the portal. Add a URL path such as /products/example-t-shirt or /collections/best-sellers, then set your preferred duration in seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks. Durations apply on three levels:
- Globally — your default setting, intelligently determined by Nostra. To recommend changes to it, contact support.
- By individual page — the most granular option. For example, refreshing your homepage (your site's root, path
/) more frequently. - By a group of pages — a path like
/productsapplies to every URL containing it, including/products/example-shirtand/products/example-hat.
The Cache Settings tab is only available to store owners. If you have admin access and need to set a custom duration, ask your store's owner for owner-level permissions. Owners can edit or delete any custom path's settings — except the global default and your homepage duration, which are crucial to your site's optimization and can't be deleted.
Duration Prioritization
When a URL matches more than one of your custom paths on a "starts with" basis, the longest matching path wins.
Say you've set /products/example-t-shirt to 7,854 seconds and /products to 4,200 seconds:
| Page | Matches | Duration used |
|---|---|---|
/products/example-t-shirt | Both paths — longest is /products/example-t-shirt | 7,854 s |
/products/example-hat | Only /products | 4,200 s |
Dynamic Content & Your Cart
Dynamic content changes based on user interaction or real-time factors, and it needs proper cache configuration. Your shopping cart is the perfect example — it displays different items for each customer based on their selections.
Before launching updates that involve dynamically loaded content — especially cart changes — notify Nostra. This lets our engineers configure the cache correctly, so your customers get a seamless, accurate experience without encountering outdated cart information or other stale dynamic elements.
When to Contact Support
Our engineers configure each site to work seamlessly with Nostra during onboarding, and may need to adjust that configuration as your store evolves. Some changes need our involvement rather than a manual clearing. Please contact support before:
- Changing any dynamic elements of your theme, such as forms, shopping carts, checkout pages, advertisements, product recommendations, or personalized greetings and messages
- Changing any elements that affect the flow of a slide-out cart
- Adding a personalized app to your store
- Changing any elements that alter a page when an item is in the cart
- Changing any elements that add new functions to your cart or modify existing ones
As a reminder, Nostra's webhooks update your cache in real time whenever you make product or inventory changes, including any pages affected by those changes.
Common Questions
Do I need to clear my cache after changing a price or inventory?
No. Product updates, inventory changes, and collection updates trigger automatic cache clearings in real time. Manual clearing is only for the situations listed in When to Clear Manually.
Will clearing /products/ clear all of my product pages?
No — single page clearings require an exact path match. To manage a whole group of pages that share a prefix, set a custom cache duration on the shared path instead, which does support prefix matching.
Why is my cache clearing still "pending"?
Your request sits in the cache-clearing queue until the job completes, which can take a few minutes. Once done, it moves into your cache history.
Who can change cache durations?
Only store owners can access Cache Settings. Admins who need to set custom durations should ask their store's owner for owner-level permissions.
Should I clear a single page or my whole site?
Clear the smallest thing that covers your change. One updated page? Clear that page. Changes across many pages? Clear the site. If you're not sure, contact support for guidance.
Not sure about a change? Ask us first.
Our team can tell you whether a change needs a configuration update, a manual clearing, or nothing at all — and help you tune cache durations for your store.
Contact Support Open the Portal
