Cachebuster – A Pro Tip for Bypassing Cache

Caching is a great way to improve website performance and minimize the load.

An ideal cache displays the cached version until the content changes and flushes the cache when there is a change. Yet, there may be cases where the cached version is not the most up-to-date one (if there is a DB error on the site or the caching is only time-based..).

And, we may want Uptime Robot to load the non-cached version on each request to make sure that the uptime/downtime is decided accordingly.

Here is a tiny feature (a pro tip) that can help bypassing cache.

Cachebuster

Uptime Robot will auto-replace the string:

• *cachebuster*

in the querystring with a unique timestamp every time so that each request is unique.

As an example, if the website to be monitored is:

• https://mywebsitetomonitor.com

We can use the URL as:

• https://mywebsitetomonitor.com/?*cachebuster*

and the request will have a different querystring each time.

Hope this helps for a better uptime.

Update (2019-11-19): The feature can now be used for custom HTTP headers and POST values as well.