Effective July 30, 2026, Govstack websites now have page-level caching enabled. This caching is a critical aspect of ensuring your website remains available and and loads quickly during periods of high traffic, and when your website experiences a large volume of crawling activity. As part of this update, you may notice some differences in your content writing experience. This page details what to expect, and how you are impacted.
What is Changing?
Until now, all pages, news posts, and all other content on the website have been displayed to visitors based on the latest version that has been published. If a new page was created, or an existing page was changed, that content would be seen immediately wherever it appears on the website upon publish. Following this update, all content on the website will be cached. In short, this means that when a visitor now loads any page on the website, they will see the cached version of that page, which may not include recent content changes from the most recent publish for a brief period of time.
When you are not actively making changes to your website, a visitor will see a version of the page as it appeared in the last hour. When a change is made to the website, such as when a new page is created, an existing page is updated, or the navigation or design of the website changes, the caching of your website is refreshed within 10 minutes, after which time your changes will begin to appear to visitors, per our current capabilities with Microsoft Azure.
Why Are We Making this Change?
After an extensive review of traffic on Govstack websites, we found that a growing volume of traffic, including increased web crawling activity from AI agents, was causing reduced performance that impacted the ability for your website to respond quickly to all visitors. In cases where traffic on the website is very high, the website could become unresponsive and prevent your visitors from completing important tasks or finding information.
Since website performance is a key aspect of ensuring your visitors have a quality experience engaging with your organization and for SEO fundamentals, over the past several months, Govstack websites have been updated with a series of performance enhancements to improve website load times and prevent outages in extreme cases. To date, these enhancements have been “under-the-hood” changes that have not affected the experience for content editing or website visitors.
Without the implementation of caching, we have continued to observe that further improvements were still required to protect the reliability of your website and your organization. This new enhancement will contribute significantly to the performance of your website, and is a very common approach taken by many content management systems. While we have reduced caching periods to the furthest extent possible at the current time, we do recognize that this update will have some impact on your experience within Govstack CMS, as detailed below.
How Am I Impacted?
You do not have to take any action as part of this update. Caching is automatically applied to your entire website, including any and all microsites, subsites, landing pages, interior pages, alerts, news posts, Media Manager pages, or other content pages created on Govstack CMS.
When you create new page, news post, or any other type of content that creates a new URL on the website, this page will be visitable right away on the first publish. This is inclusive of any pages created that are public-facing, or found in a secured area or intranet. This means any new pages or news posts you create can be viewed and shared without delay. This update does not impact the delivery of news subscription notifications. The rest of the website, which may reference this new page in links, buttons, listings, feeds, or the main or side navigation, will update within 10 minutes, per our current capabilities with Microsoft Azure.
If an existing page or content node is changed after it has been published for the first time, those changes can take up to 10 minutes to become visible on the website after the next publish. If a page’s URL is changed by changing its name, moving it to a different section of the website, or rewriting it via an Alternative URL or Alternative Name under its SEO & Share tab, the page’s latest content will show under that new URL right away, and the old page’s old URL with the older content may continue to appear until the cache has updated. Automatic and manual redirects to new page URLs will function the same way you are used to at that time.
A key note of the caching of your website is it only applies to published URLs. When you are previewing changes before publishing, those changes will always show immediately in your preview page after each save. If you are familiar with skipping previews and publishing all your changes directly, we advise you to preview your changes first rather than wait to see the published result.
If a page is unpublished or deleted, the removal of pages from your website will take up to 10 minutes to apply. Between the time the unpublish or delete action was performed and the cache updating, the page will continue to show under its URL and across the website’s navigation menus, links, buttons, listings, and feeds.
For pages and media that you intend to secure or make part of your intranet, note that if the content or media files were initially used on a public page that you now want to make secured, all of the content and media on the affected page will continue to remain visible to the public until the cache is updated. The same principle applies if you want to unsecure a page’s content and media and make it public. The login requirement for access will continue to apply briefly.
Lastly, your website’s Robots.txt and XML sitemaps are excluded from caching, and will always be up-to-date. Changes to your website’s structure for indexing will always be reflected in these files as soon as you make changes, without delay.
What Can I Expect in the Future?
We are planning to continue making performance improvements to your Govstack website over time, and page-level caching is only one part of our commitment to provide an excellent quality of service for your visitors. In future Govstack CMS releases, you can expect additional enhancements intended to improve reliability and page load times. Some of these changes will include the modernization of key libraries and dependencies used on Govstack websites, and updates to page rendering logic to use the latest techniques.
To stay informed on future updates to Govstack CMS and other Govstack products, we encourage you to visit our Product Updates section of our Support Portal.
For any questions on page-level caching or other performance improvements being made to your website, please submit a ticket to our Support Team.
Frequently Asked Questions
It has been more than 10 minutes and my changes are not appearing on the website. What should I do?
In some rare circumstances, it may take longer than 10 minutes to refresh the cache of your website. If you are consistently seeing it take more than 10 minutes for content changes to appear on your website, please submit a ticket to our Support Team . To assist us with investigating your issue, please be prepared to send us information on the current date and time you encountered the issue, and on which page(s).
Can I opt out of this update?
No. To ensure your website remains available during periods of high traffic or when it experiences a large volume of web crawling activity, caching of pages is a critical tool to ensure your website can always serve your visitors.
How do other content management systems handle this?
Most content management systems that serve large volumes of traffic employ page-level caching as a core way of handling traffic on the website and preventing outages. In CMSs that serve smaller needs, they may not have page-level caching or provide service levels that guarantee uptime. Some CMSs have caching refreshes that can extend past a day or longer. Govstack’s page-caching strategy is to be as low-impact as possible, and we’ve strived for the lowest refresh period possible.
Is this update permanent?
Yes. Page-level caching is a permanent part of Govstack’s infrastructure and will stay in place for your website, even in times when traffic to your website may not be high.
Can I request to change how the caching works?
The current strategy of page-level caching is centrally managed by Govstack and can’t be changed for your specific website’s needs. If you do encounter challenges or friction with the current functionality of the caching, we do encourage you to let us know by submitting a ticket to our Support Team so we can plan future enhancements.
Does this impact all features on my website?
Page-level caching applies to all content created on Govstack CMS. It does not apply to the following products:
- Events
- Forms
- Business Directory
- Parks & Facilities
- 2Big4Email
Please note, if you provide links or feeds on pages on your CMS, such as a link to a form or a Calendar Feed component, these pages will be included in the cache.