Why Purging Nginx Cache Is Only Half the Job (And How I Built the Other Half)

If you're self-hosting WordPress behind Nginx with caching, you've probably relied on plugins to automatically purge your cache. 📝 Post updated → 🗑 cache wiped → ✅ done. Except it's not done. The cache is now cold. The next visitor hits your server with a full uncached PHP + DB round trip and pays the latency penalty — the exact problem caching was supposed to solve. Most Nginx cache plugins only purge — they leave the cache cold. I wanted something that could fix that — which eventually led me to build NPP (Nginx Cache Purge Preload), a plugin that preloads your Nginx cache so visitors always hit a cached page. But before we get to NPP, here’s the problem that almost every WordPress + Nginx setup silently suffers from. The Problem No One Was Solving When I set up Nginx caching on my WordPress sites, the workflow looked like this: Publish or update a post Plugin purges the relevant cache entries First real visitor triggers a full PHP + DB round trip to rebuild the cache Everyone afte