A post to demonstrate whether Siteground’s caching service can handle access-locked Patreon content. (I’m backdating it so it doesn’t appear at the top of the homepage, but it originally went live at 1:42 AM on 6/10/2025.)
Pillowcase cat should only be visible to $1-and-up patrons:
Soda box cat (and teacup cats) should only be visible to $5-and-up patrons:
Fancy hat cat should only be visible to $10-and-up patrons:
5 thoughts on “Patreon plugin integration test”
Erin Ptah
Initial report: Opening this in a private window (or in a whole other browser) shows a cached version of the unlocked images. No indication that they’re even *supposed* to be paywalled.
When I locked the post itself, that worked. It showed up as paywalled if I wasn’t logged in. But I need the caching to avoid individual images.
In the Patreon plugin settings, “Prevent caching of gated content” is set to “Yes”.
In the Siteground Speed Optimizer settings, “Exclude URLs from Caching” includes this on the list, which should cover all three images:
https://www.bicatperson.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/*
Erin Ptah
Today’s test: edited the “Exclude URLs From Caching” list, it now looks like this:
/patreon-plugin-integration-test/
/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/pillowcasecat-768×576.jpg/
/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/*
/wp-content/uploads/*.jpg
And then ran a manual cache purge. I’ll come back in a bit to see if that did anything.
Erin Ptah
Today’s update: Chatted with a SiteGround service rep. Did some troubleshooting. Confirmed the following:
– It’s not a conflict with the Jetpack plugin, the image-locking is still broken with Jetpack turned off
– If Siteground Optimizer is deactivated (in the WordPress dashboard), but NGINX Direct Delivery is still active (in the Siteground Site Tools dashboard), image locking is broken. It’s only when both features are turned off that the image locking works.
– At the end of the chat, both features were disabled on bicatperson.com, and the service rep saw the paywalled images in this post as correctly locked.
– As of this comment, I re-enabled both features on bicatperson.com. (Trying not to hit the limits on my account resource usage, here.)
– This example post on leifandthorn.com still shows how Patreon image-locking is supposed to work, on a site where NGINX Direct Delivery and Siteground Optimizer are both disabled.
Erin Ptah
Late-night update: as of now, NGINX is off, Speed Optimizer is on, this might actually work with the image locking? Going to leave it like this for a bit, see if it holds up.
Tech support confirmed that NGINX definitely breaks it. The Patreon plugin requires on custom .htaccess rules, which NGINX ignores. (In my perfect world, Siteground would either upgrade their existing services to work with .htaccess rules, or they would offer an alternate caching service that respects .htaccess rules. I don’t know if either of those is likely to happen IRL. We’ll see.)
Erin Ptah
Final update from the future:
Speed Optimizer is still on here at BICP. Turned NGINX back on too. And I deactivated the Patreon plugin, because I was only using it for testing purposes, and there’s no reason to keep it running indefinitely.
Over on Leif & Thorn…I’m pretty sure Siteground tech support tried to be Proactive and Helpful…by turning Speed Optimizer on without telling me. Because everything on the site that uses Javascript broke without warning, and readers helped me trace the problem to the plugin I hadn’t touched.
But now the Javascript issue is fixed, the Speed Optimizer plugin is still running on Leif & Thorn, and the NGINX caching is off. With that setup, Patreon images are locking correctly.
Here’s hoping it’s a nice long while before the next thing breaks!
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