To manage caching and refresh your Instagram content, navigate to Elevated › Instagram Feed and select the Settings tab at the top of your dashboard interface. Under the Media Caching panel, you can toggle Enable Media Caching to ON or OFF to control local file storage. You can also click the red Clear Cache button to delete locally downloaded files or click Refresh Feeds to force an immediate API sync.
Serving social media feeds directly from external servers can lead to performance drops and API rate limit locks. Instagram’s Graph API endpoints enforce strict hourly query limits. If your website queries Instagram’s API on every single page load, your feed will quickly exceed these limits and stop displaying content.
Elevated Instagram Feed addresses this by caching media assets locally. When caching is active, the plugin downloads your feed’s images, video thumbnails, and captions directly to your local WordPress server. When a visitor loads your page, the shortcode renders these files from your fast local directories, bypassing external API calls completely. This keeps your page load times fast and secures your feed against API rate-limiting errors.
To manage your cache settings, navigate to Elevated › Instagram Feed in your WordPress dashboard. Click the Settings tab located at the top of the interface.
Configure your caching preferences under the Media Caching panel:
If you make design changes, modify your feed colors, or want the new posts to show up:
The plugin will safely delete all locally downloaded JPEG, PNG, and MP4 files associated with your feeds. The asset directory will automatically rebuild during the next feed request or manual refresh cycle.
If you have just published a new post on Instagram and want it to display on your WordPress site immediately without waiting for the next background update:
The plugin will bypass background timers, make a secure API call to Instagram, download your latest media assets, and update all active shortcode outputs instantly.
To keep your feeds fresh without manual intervention, Elevated Instagram Feed uses a background update system powered by WordPress’s built-in cron scheduler (WP-Cron).
At regular intervals, the background cron scheduler queries the Instagram API for new content. If a new post is detected, the plugin silently downloads and caches the assets in the background. This automatic syncing ensures your frontend layout is always up-to-date without affecting page load times for active visitors.
New Instagram posts are not showing up on the WordPress website
If your newly published Instagram posts are missing from your site, your background scheduler (WP-Cron) may be disabled or blocked by your hosting environment. To resolve this, open your Settings panel and click the white Refresh Feeds button to force a manual sync. If the posts display successfully after clicking the button, contact your host to ensure that WP-Cron tasks are executing correctly on your server.
The Clear Cache button does not respond or displays an error
This issue occurs if your server’s directory permissions prevent WordPress from deleting files inside your upload folder. Verify that your server’s file permissions are configured correctly: directories should be set to 755 and files should be set to 644. Correcting these permissions will allow the plugin to safely delete and rebuild the local caching folders.
