Quickstart
From empty account to a working, verified cache warmer with proof that it improved your load times.
12 min read
This is a complete first setup. Expect about fifteen minutes of work, plus however long your DNS takes to propagate. At the end you will have a warmer running on a schedule and a Cache health page proving it made your site faster.
What you need before you start
A website you control, and the ability to either add a DNS record for its domain or upload a file to it. One or the other is enough.
Step 1 — Create your account
Register and confirm your email address. You will be asked for a verification token that arrives by email — check your spam folder if it does not show up within a minute.
The free plan is enough to complete this entire guide. You can warm a real site on it, with lower limits than the paid tiers.
After signing in you land on Cache health. It will be empty — there is no crawl data yet. An onboarding guide offers a tour; take it or skip it, this page covers the same ground in more detail.
Step 2 — Verify your hostname
Cache Rocket refuses to send traffic at a domain until you have proven you control it. This is the one step you cannot skip.
Go to Account → Hostnames, enter your domain, and pick a verification method.
Use the exact hostname you will warm
example.com and www.example.com are different hostnames. Verify the one your entry URLs will actually use — if your site redirects to www, verify www.example.com.
Option A — DNS TXT record
Choose DNS TXT record, click Start verification, and Cache Rocket shows you a record name and a token value. Add that TXT record at your DNS provider, wait for it to propagate, then click Verify.
Propagation is usually a few minutes but can take up to an hour depending on your provider's TTL. If verification fails, wait and click Verify again — nothing is lost by retrying.
Option B — HTTPS file or meta tag
Choose HTTPS file or meta tag instead. Cache Rocket gives you a file path, its expected contents, and an equivalent <meta> tag. Publish either one and click Verify.
This is usually faster than DNS and is the better fit for Next.js, Vercel, Netlify, and other app hosts where you deploy files but may not control DNS. Full detail on both methods is in Hostname verification.
Good to know
When the hostname shows Verified in the list, you are past the hardest part. Everything from here is configuration.
Step 3 — Create your first warmer
Go to Account → Warmers and click Add warmer. The form has several sections, but for a first warmer you only need two fields.
- 1
Leave Active switched off
Configure everything first, then turn it on deliberately. A warmer that is off costs you nothing.
- 2
Give it a name
Something you will recognise in a list six months from now — “Main site”, “Shop – products”, “Blog”. It is a label for you and is never shown to visitors.
- 3
Add one entry URL
Your homepage, with the full
https://prefix:https://www.example.com. It must use the hostname you just verified. - 4
Turn on Include sitemaps if your plan allows it
This is the highest-value optional setting. It lets the warmer pick up every URL your CMS publishes, including new pages, without you maintaining a list.
- 5
Leave every other setting at its default
Depth, timeouts, and rate limits are pre-filled with values that suit most sites. Tune them later once you have data.
- 6
Save the warmer
Click Create warmer. It appears in your list, inactive.
Start narrow, then widen
It is tempting to crank depth up and warm everything on day one. Resist. A shallow warmer that works tells you your caching is healthy; a huge one that half-fails tells you nothing and annoys your origin server.
Step 4 — Run it once and watch
Switch the warmer to Active and start a run. Then open the warmer's detail page to watch results arrive.
You will see a row per URL with its status code, depth, content type, and — the important bit — a first load time and a second load time. Summary figures across the top show total URLs, successes, failures, average load times, total duration, and pages per minute.
| What you see | What to do |
|---|---|
Status codes are 200 and second load is much faster than first | Everything is working. Move to step 5. |
Status codes are 403 or 429 | A firewall, bot filter, or rate limiter is blocking the crawler. Lower max URLs per minute and consider allow-listing Cache Rocket. See Troubleshooting. |
Status codes are 301 or 302 | Your entry URL redirects. Change it to the destination — often adding or removing www, or switching to https. |
| Only one URL was crawled | No links were discovered. Check that depth is at least 1 and that your homepage links to other pages in plain HTML. |
| First and second load times are both slow | Your pages are not being cached at all. Warming cannot fix that — the caching itself needs attention first. |
| Nothing ran at all | Confirm the warmer is Active and that its hostname shows Verified. |
Step 5 — Confirm it in Cache health
Open Account → Cache health. Now that crawl data exists, this page becomes the place you actually live.
- Warmth score — the share of tracked URLs that look properly cached. Higher is better.
- Average improvement — how much faster the warm load is than the first load, across your site. This is your return on investment, in milliseconds.
- Cold / slow URLs — the specific pages that are not benefiting. This list is your to-do list.
Every field on that page is explained in Cache health.
Step 6 — Get told when it breaks
A warmer that silently stopped working is worse than no warmer, because you will believe you are covered. Spend two minutes on an alert now.
Go to Account → Alerts, choose Slack, Discord, or a generic webhook, paste the webhook URL, and tick at least Crawl error and High error rate. Full instructions are in Alerts.
Tip
Leave Crawl completed switched off unless you specifically want an audit trail. On a frequent schedule it produces a lot of noise, and noisy channels get muted.
You are done. What next?
You now have a verified hostname, a scheduled warmer, visible proof it works, and a notification if it stops. That is a complete, healthy setup.
Warm after every deploy
Deploys empty caches wholesale. A webhook from your CI closes the gap automatically.
Tune the warmer
Every field explained, with guidance on what to change and when.
Warm your APIs too
If you run a headless front end or a public API, those caches go cold as well.
Purge and rewarm at your CDN
Update content, clear the edge, and refill it in one action.
Concentrate warming on peak hours
Schedule windows let you warm hard before traffic and back off overnight.
Bring in your team
Workspaces and roles, so clients and colleagues see only what they should.