Title: Issues with caching plugins
Last modified: August 19, 2019

---

# Issues with caching plugins

 *  Resolved [irismoebius](https://wordpress.org/support/users/irismoebius/)
 * (@irismoebius)
 * [6 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-caching-plugins/)
 * Please excuse if a topic on this already exists. The search function doesn’t 
   seem to work (for me) – no matter what word I search for, it always comes up 
   with “no result”.
 * I’m trying to optimize my website for speed by setting up a caching tool. I’ve
   tried a ton of different ones now, but all of them mess up the look of my gallery.
   I’m displaying a Flickr gallery with photonic, with the Image Lightbox and a 
   justified grid. All caching plugins force the pictures into squares, thereby 
   squashing them.
 * Does anybody have experience with how to solve this, e.g. what caching plugins
   might work or what settings I have to put either in the gallery or the caching
   plugin? I’d be happy to exclude the gallery page or photonic generally from caching
   as well. As long as I can optimize the rest of my website, this should already
   greatly improve speed. I’m afraid I am quite attached to the justified gallery,
   my photos aren’t really suitable for square thumbnails (and I haven’t tested 
   if this would solve the problem yet either).
    -  This topic was modified 6 years, 9 months ago by [irismoebius](https://wordpress.org/support/users/irismoebius/).
 * The page I need help with: _[[log in](https://login.wordpress.org/?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Fwordpress.org%2Fsupport%2Ftopic%2Fissues-with-caching-plugins%2F%3Foutput_format%3Dmd&locale=en_US)
   to see the link]_

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

 *  Plugin Author [Sayontan Sinha](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sayontan/)
 * (@sayontan)
 * [6 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-caching-plugins/#post-11845499)
 * The square thumbnails are resultant from Lazy Loading, not caching.
 * There are multiple concepts at play when you are loading a gallery:
    1. **Caching of images** – I very strongly advocate against this if your source
       is anything other than WordPress. When you are using image caching, the plugin
       that you are using will make a copy of the original image to a different location,
       thereby replicating everything you already have elsewhere. All providers such
       as Flickr, SmugMug, Google etc. make a living out of serving images out of a
       content delivery network (CDN) and any performance gains that they provide as
       a result will far outweigh anything that a cached image on WP will provide. 
       Typically image caching gets triggered if you activate image optimization on
       plugins like JetPack.
    2. **Caching of your page markup** – Unlike image caching, this simply keeps a 
       copy of your page’s markup from a point in time in cache, i.e. whatever you 
       see when you do a “View Source” on your page gets stored in the cache, preventing
       your page from using server resources (such as a call to Flickr to get the image
       listing for an album). If you are looking to optimize, this is a good one to
       target under two conditions:
 *  1. Your source should not be Google. Google issues short-lived URLs, so it doesn’t
       work with caching.
    2. Your source should be static. If you are adding new images to an album you will
       not see those in the cached copy, and you will have to regenerate your page 
       cache.
 *  - **Lazy Loading** – Unlike the previous two this works in the user’s browser,
      not in your server. And this is one thing you absolutely cannot use with Justified
      Grids (or even the Mosaic or Masonry layouts). The reasoning is very simple:
      a justified grid requires full knowledge of the image’s dimensions before 
      constructing the layout. When you have lazy loading activated you are fundamentally
      preventing the full dimensions from being determined, and hence the layout
      computation is incorrect. So lazy loading cannot coexist with a justified 
      grid layout.
    - In your case the culprit is lazy loading, and you will have to figure out 
      if you can prevent targeting certain markup elements using your lazy loading
      plugin. To wit, when you are using Photonic other non-Photonic galleries /
      images are left untouched by Photonic behaviour. Along similar lines your 
      lazy loading plugin, if well-designed, should be able to support exclusion
      of certain images. If you find no such option you have to disable lazy loading
      altogether.
 *  Plugin Author [Sayontan Sinha](https://wordpress.org/support/users/sayontan/)
 * (@sayontan)
 * [6 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-caching-plugins/#post-11854747)
 * I am marking this “Resolved” as it looks like this is working on your website
   now. Please feel free to reopen this thread if you feel otherwise.
 *  Thread Starter [irismoebius](https://wordpress.org/support/users/irismoebius/)
 * (@irismoebius)
 * [6 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-caching-plugins/#post-11855811)
 * Sayontan,
 * yes, thank you so much for your detailed answer, I completely forgot to reply:-\
   
   But this was very helpful! I disabled lazy loading entirely now until I figured
   out how to exclude the photo or plugin or page.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘Issues with caching plugins’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/photonic/assets/icon.svg?rev=1972449)
 * [Photonic Gallery & Lightbox for Flickr, SmugMug & Others](https://wordpress.org/plugins/photonic/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/photonic/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/photonic/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/photonic/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/photonic/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/photonic/reviews/)

## Tags

 * [cache](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/cache/)
 * [caching](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/caching/)

 * 3 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [irismoebius](https://wordpress.org/support/users/irismoebius/)
 * Last activity: [6 years, 9 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/issues-with-caching-plugins/#post-11855811)
 * Status: resolved