Introduction
Layer 7 Edge Caching™ is a managed caching reverse proxy and web application firewall for WordPress sites. It sits between your visitors and your origin server, answers most requests from memory, and filters malicious traffic before it reaches PHP.
Each site gets its own Varnish Cache instance with a configuration (VCL) generated from the settings you choose in the admin panel. TLS termination and routing are handled by Traefik, and threat detection by CrowdSec. You keep your WordPress hosting exactly as it is: Edge Caching only needs your DNS to point to it.
What you get
Section titled “What you get”- Full-page caching of anonymous traffic, with logged-in users, carts and admin pages always passed through to the origin.
- Automatic invalidation from the WordPress plugin: editing a post purges only the pages it affects.
- Always Online: if the origin goes down or returns errors, expired pages keep being served from cache for up to 48 hours.
- A web application firewall combining CrowdSec’s community blocklist, behavioral detection, virtual patching for known vulnerabilities, and per-site rules such as geo blocking and XML-RPC blocking.
- Managed TLS with Let’s Encrypt certificates issued and renewed automatically, or your own certificate.
- Visibility into every site: hit rate, bandwidth, live request logs and origin health alerts.
Who it is for
Section titled “Who it is for”Edge Caching is designed for teams that operate WordPress sites at a professional level: agencies, hosting providers, and in-house developers or system administrators. The defaults are tuned for WordPress, and the documentation assumes you are comfortable with DNS, HTTP caching semantics and basic server administration.
Key concepts
Section titled “Key concepts”These terms are used throughout the documentation.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Origin | The server hosting your WordPress installation. Edge Caching connects to it by IPv4 address, over HTTPS. |
| Edge | The Edge Caching platform: the servers your visitors actually connect to. |
| Hit / miss | A hit is answered from cache. A miss is fetched from the origin, then stored if cacheable. |
| Pass (bypass) | A request that is never cached, such as a logged-in session or a checkout page. It always goes to the origin. |
| TTL | How long a cached response is considered fresh. |
| Grace | How long an expired response is kept so it can still be served when the origin is unavailable. This is what powers Always Online. |
| Invalidation (purge) | Removing responses from the cache before their TTL expires, usually because the content changed. |
| VCL | Varnish Configuration Language: the per-site program that decides what is cached, bypassed or blocked. |
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Why Edge Caching explains the problems the platform is designed to solve.
- Why Varnish covers the caching engine behind Edge Caching and the organizations that rely on it.
- Architecture walks through the path of a request and the components involved.
- Adding a site gets your first site running.