# The 7 Golden Rules of Cache Warming — CacheBoost Blog > Cache warming isn't just pointing a crawler at your sitemap. Here are the 7 golden rules for warming the right content, in the right place, at the right time, and proving it works. Source: https://www.cache-boost.com/blog/seven-golden-rules-cache-warming.md Language: en --- Tags: tutorial, performance, seo Published: 2026-07-23 Author: Nicolas Hodin Reading time: 5 min --- **In summary:** - Warm the CDN, not just the application cache - Make sure your pages are actually cacheable, and focus on the URLs that matter - Account for cache variations and match frequency to your update cycles - Plan for seasonal peaks and track your warming statistics Cache warming isn't just pointing a crawler at your sitemap every hour. Done right, [cache warming](/blog/what-is-cache-warming-complete-guide) keeps your TTFB on the floor for visitors and crawlers alike. Done blind, it wastes crawl budget, hammers your origin, and gives you a false sense of security. Here are the 7 golden rules we follow at CacheBoost. ## 1. Warm the CDN, not just the application cache This is the most commonly missed rule. Most warmers install **on the server** (a WordPress plugin, a local cron), so they only reheat the origin-side page cache. Your CDN stays cold — and the CDN is what actually serves your visitors and bots. To warm the right CDN node, you have to send the request **from the geographic location of the client or bot** you're targeting: - French consumer market → from Paris. - SEO and GEO crawlers (Googlebot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot…) → from the US, where most of them originate. - Multiple markets → one warm-up per region. A warm-up fired from the right PoP fills the edge cache your users will actually hit. A warm-up fired from your server fills… only your server. That's the whole difference between [warming your CDN and warming your origin](/blog/why-cache-warming-matters-for-seo-geo). ## 2. Make sure your pages are actually cacheable Before optimizing *when* and *where* you warm, make sure you're not warming into a void. A page that returns any of these signals will never be cached by the CDN, no matter what you do: - a status other than `200` (redirects, errors); - a `Cache-Control: no-store` or `private` header; - a `Set-Cookie` on the response (many CDNs then refuse to cache it). Look at the `cache-status` (or `cf-cache-status`, `x-cache`…) of your warmed responses. If you see `DYNAMIC` or `BYPASS` where you expected a `HIT`, your warm-up is running empty. This is by far the number-one cause of "my warm-up does nothing": the cache configuration, not the warmer. ## 3. Focus warming on the URLs that matter Your warming budget — and your bots' crawl budget — is finite. Warming 50,000 URLs at the same frequency dilutes the effort and lets your important pages go cold between passes. Prioritize: - your **top products and categories** (the ones that drive revenue); - your **campaign landing pages**; - your most-visited pages, per analytics; - the pages your crawlers hit most, per your **crawl logs**. A prioritized `sitemap.xml` is a good starting point; your crawl logs and analytics are even better, because they reflect real demand. > **Go easy on your origin.** Prioritizing also means not firing everything at once. An overly aggressive warm-up can saturate the origin server, or even look like an attack. Cap concurrency and spread requests over time, especially on large catalogs. ## 4. Account for your cache variations A single URL can have **several distinct cache entries**: desktop version, mobile version, bot version, store or currency context, language… If your cache segments by `User-Agent`, a cookie, or a header, then warming a single variant leaves all the others cold. Configure your warmer to reproduce each variant that matters: - the right `User-Agent` (desktop, mobile, and the user-agents of the crawlers you target); - the cookies that determine context (selected store, currency, language); - the headers your `Vary` logic accounts for. The goal: the cache key your warm-up generates should be **exactly** the one a real visitor or bot will produce. ## 5. Match frequency to your update cycles The best time to warm is **right after an invalidation**. If a stock or price import purges your cache every night, run the warm-up right behind it, once the import finishes — not at a fixed hour "just in case." That way the first real visitor of the morning hits an already-warm cache, not the aftermath of the purge. The same logic applies to [deployments](/blog/what-is-cache-warming-complete-guide): a release that flushes the cache should trigger a warm-up behind it. > **Warm faster than the TTL expires.** If your pages have a 2-hour TTL and you warm every 6 hours, the cache goes cold between passes and your visitors pay the miss. The warming cadence should always be shorter than the lifetime of your cache entries. ## 6. Plan ahead for seasonal peaks and big moments Predictable traffic spikes deserve a scheduled warm-up. Before a peak, your key pages should already be warm on every relevant PoP — you don't want the first buyer of the sale to eat the cold cache. Schedule a warm-up ahead of: - your **private sales, seasonal sales, and flash events**; - **calendar peaks** (Black Friday, holiday season, back-to-school, Valentine's Day…); - your **campaigns** (email, paid search, influencer) that send a sudden surge to specific landing pages. For flash sales and other timed operations, warm the relevant pages a few minutes before opening, not when the traffic arrives. ## 7. Track your warming statistics A warm-up you don't measure is a warm-up you don't control. Two indicators read together: - A **high miss rate on the warming side** is a good sign: it shows your warmer is reaching cold pages and doing its job — paying the penalty instead of your visitors. - A **high hit rate on real traffic** (visitors and bots) is the end goal: it proves your CDN is warm when real demand arrives. Cross-reference these numbers with your purge events and traffic peaks to confirm warming keeps pace (see [how to measure your cache hit ratio](/blog/how-to-measure-cache-hit-ratio)). This is exactly what our **new Crawlers page** does: it tracks, over time, which SEO and GEO crawlers hit your cache and whether they got a HIT or a MISS, unifying Cloudflare data (the edge's real cache status) with the WordPress plugin's. You finally see, page by page, whether your bots land on a warm cache — and therefore whether your first six rules are paying off. ## In short 1. Warm the **CDN**, from the right geographic location — not just the origin. 2. Verify your pages are **actually cacheable** before anything else. 3. **Prioritize** the URLs that matter, without saturating the origin. 4. Reproduce cache **variations** (mobile/desktop/bot, context, cookies, `User-Agent`). 5. Match **frequency** to your purges and deployments, shorter than the TTL. 6. **Plan ahead** for seasonal peaks, sales, and campaigns. 7. **Measure**: high miss on the warming side, high hit on real traffic. Follow these seven rules and cache warming stops being a cron you fire and forget, and becomes a real lever for performance and visibility. --- **CacheBoost** — Automatic cache warming for faster websites. - Website: https://www.cache-boost.com - Full content (all pages): https://www.cache-boost.com/llms-full.txt - LLM index: https://www.cache-boost.com/llms.txt - Documentation: https://www.cache-boost.com/support/getting-started/introduction - Start free: https://www.cache-boost.com/try