Extending Default Cache Time to Improve Your Website’s Performance

Thursday 10 April 2025

GovCMS is introducing an important update to extend the default cache time from 15 minutes to 1 week. The update, applying to all SaaS and PaaS customers using Akamai, will optimise website performance by reducing the frequency of the GovCMS Content Delivery Network (CDN) needing to replenish default cached objects.

This process has been tested and validated with several of the largest websites on the platform for more than 12 months. These websites were monitored to ensure that content would update as expected, minimising risk and effort for publishing teams and GovCMS. As part of this process, GovCMS has increased the number of cache tags that are identified by Akamai.

What Do You Need to Do?

You don’t need to do anything, as we will take care of the update for customers to the cache lifetime. This update will be applied automatically during the month of April.

When publishing, your content will still automatically update as expected. You can manually clear the cache of specific pages and resources to ensure that the Akamai service retrieves new versions of content or files (images, documents, etc).

If you are having issues with caching, raise a ticket on the GovCMS Service Desk.

Related Information

The following Knowledge base articles are available to help: