Can a cache make a broken website survive?

Hi,

I have a friend having issues on her site and I think it’s a cache related issue. The first time you visit the site, the site gives an error 500 but when you refresh the page it works.

I saw that the .htaccess has a pile of code from your plugin but the plugin isn’t installed on the site.

The site recently got scripted and infected pretty badly. I did a huge clean up and got rid of the infection but I had to delete a lot of stuff.

Now my question is, if I have deleted something important in the site by mistake, can the cache keep the site alive? I’m pretty sure it’s not possible but I just want to be sure before deleting the pile of code in the .htaccess.

Thanks!