Said It Here

How to stop cache warming from crashing the server

Running scheduled curl scripts across hundreds of URLs every thirty minutes creates too much parallel traffic as a site grows. This heavy request load hammers the origin server and can easily kill site performance when the sitemap expands.

Overview
People affected2 accounts across 1 forum
Workarounds found3 items attempted
Community agreement2 total upvotes

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

Found another way around this?

Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.

  1. 1
    relying on commercial speed optimization plugins
    Did this help you?
  2. 2
    using edge caching services like Cloudflare APO
    Did this help you?
  3. 3
    triggering full purges only on specific events like updates rather than running warm repeatedly
    Did this help you?

In their words

Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.

r/Wordpress2 people · September 2026

“solid approach, but watch your server load if the sites grow. warming every 30 min is fine for smaller sitemaps but can hammer your origin if you're hitting hundreds of URLs in parallel.”source ↗

TopSydeWP · r/Wordpress · 1 upvotes

“Don’t curl your entire site every 30 minutes - that will kill your server with a decent number of pages.”source ↗

bluesix_v2 · r/Wordpress · 1 upvotes

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised