because my site is hosted on Bluehost and I’m not using any caching plugin except the one provided by bluehost which is set on level 2 (normal level)
That’s the bluehost caching you wrote about.
There should be an option on bluehost to purge/delete the cache.
As for the FVM cache, it’s available on fast velocity minify settings page, and it can be purged there as well.
The problem is that if you delete the cache on fast velocity minify and forget to delete the cache on the server, the css and js files will be gone, since you just deleted them, but because it’s still cached on bluehost, the page still references those deleted files.
Please also note that this plugin is geared towards developers and advanced users.
You are free to try to use it, but I would recommend hiring a developer somewhere if you want to do speed optimization, and don’t fully understand the implications of using a plugin to merge css and js files.
It may work as expected and everything is perfect, but depending on your plugins and theme, it may break your design, or some functionality may stop working.
That can happen because plugins are written by different developers and just by merging them together, things can stop working.
Of course, you can always revert by disabling and removing the plugin, but you also need to delete the cache on bluehost.
Bluehost cache will work like other cache plugins, by making copies of the final HTML page and serving them without touching wordpress. That means, while cache is valid, you could do changes on wordpress and logged out users won’t see those changes until you delete their cache.
That’s why, if you install this plugin and it merges CSS and JS files with different names, bluehost will cache those names. If you delete the cache on fast velocity, those files would be gone, but the cached page on bluehost would still point at them, thus resulting in error 404, not found when you request the cached pages.
An advanced user can install this plugin, look out for the errors (ex: looking for javascript error on the google chrome developer tools) and he will know how to use the ignore list to fix error.
If you disable the cache on bluehost and instead, use a cache plugin like the cache enabler plugin, you don’t need to worry about that, because fast velocity automatically deletes other plugins cached if needed (but not bluehost).
So in short, if you have no technical expertise to understand the settings, it would be best that you either hire someone else to do it, or that you experiment extensively all the options on a cloned version of your site, before trying to do speed optimization on the live site.
It may work with the default settings, but it’s not guaranteed.
If it doesn’t work, you can try the faq’s here:
https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/fast-velocity-minify/faq/
Or you could perhaps try the autoptimize plugin, which is more simple to use.
Note however, you will have the same cache problems with bluehost if you purge the autoptimize plugin…
