📘 This article provides information on how to force refresh pages in SpeedWorkers. SpeedWorkers is part of Botify's Activation Suite, available as an option with a Botify Pro or Enterprise plan.
Overview
SpeedWorkers Force Refresh allows you to refresh some pages faster than the refresh rate identified in Cache Behaviors. This feature helps correct incidents that may occur with code changes that affect the rendering rules and eliminates waiting for the next scheduled refresh when conducting page rendering quality checks.
How it Works
This method quickly refreshes your highest priority pages, not a large subset of your inventory, since it will adversely affect your overall inventory. Every URL that is force refreshed replaces another URL in the queue, which shifts all subsequent URLs further down the queue, meaning some pages that would have been refreshed in the next scheduled refresh could expire.
Setting Pages to Force Refresh
To set up pages to be force refreshed:
Navigate to SpeedWorkers > Settings > Control Center.
In the Force Refresh URLs section, click the Set up URLs link.
Choose your preferred source to identify URLs to be refreshed:
Manual list: In the text box, identify the URLs to be force refreshed, one URL per line.
Upload file: Upload a .TXT or .CSV file up to 2.5 MB containing the URLs to be force refreshed.
Cache behavior: Select an existing custom cache behavior to define the URLs to be force refreshed.
❗️ Use caution when force refreshing by cache behavior since it may affect the timing of recurring refreshes. For example, a force refresh of product pages every seven days will reset the refresh time for all product pages, causing a continual refresh spike every seven days.
Enable the “Don’t deliver these pages until they are refreshed” option to send requests for these pages to the origin server until the force refresh is complete. Leave this option disabled to have SpeedWorkers serve the latest cached page version from the inventory until the refresh is complete.
Select the “Refresh these pages first” option to prioritize the refresh of these pages before all other pages in the rendering queue.
Click Analyze Impact to evaluate the identified URLs against the current size of the page inventory. When complete, an evaluation of the force refresh impact displays. If the evaluation shows a significant impact on the recurring refresh, you should reduce the force refresh size.
Click Force Refresh to submit the request. A confirmation message displays when the refresh is complete.
Reducing a Force Refresh Size
If the evaluation of a force refresh shows a significant impact on the recurring refresh, the following strategies can reduce the planned force refresh size based on specific goals. Export these reports and use them as the “Upload file” source for the force refresh.
URLs crawled by Google: To prioritize the URLs Google crawled most, create a report in the SpeedWorkers Explorer with the Total Bot Requests column, sorting to display the most requests first.
URLs driving impressions/clicks: To focus on the URLs driving the most impressions and/or clicks, create a RealKeywords Explorer report with the
Impressionsand/orClickscolumns, sorting to display the most impressions/clicks first.
URLs recently or not recently refreshed: When planning a force refresh because of an event such as a bug or recent release on your website, create a SpeedWorkers Explorer report with the
Last Cache Datecolumn. Sort to find:The URLs not refreshed since the date of the event, or
The URLs recently refreshed to focus on the refreshed pages since the event occurred (e.g., a bug was introduced a few hours prior).
URLs not scheduled to be refreshed soon: To prioritize URLs not scheduled to be refreshed by a specific date, create a SpeedWorkers Explorer report with the
Next Refresh Timecolumn, sorting to find the latest scheduled times.
