# How to warm your cache ahead of visitors

> The Preloader panel gathers three ways to fill your cache before visitors arrive — sitemap crawling, scheduled warming, and automatic ranking of your hottest pages.

- Category: Cache
- Canonical: https://xspeedcache.com/docs/preloader/

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A page cache only helps once a page has been cached — and the very first visitor to any page pays the full price of building it. On a quiet site that unlucky visitor could be anyone, all day long. The **Preloader** panel is where you fix that, by visiting pages *before* your visitors do.

> **Where to find it**
>
> 1. In your WordPress admin, click **xSpeed Cache** in the left menu.
> 2. In the xSpeed Cache sidebar, open the **Cache** group.
> 3. Click the **Preloader** card.
>
> *Shortcut: open `wp-admin/admin.php?page=xspeed#/cache/preloader` directly.*
>
> ✅ This panel is part of **xSpeed Cache (Free)**. Two of its tabs are ⭐ Pro.

![The Preloader panel and its three tabs](https://xspeedcache.com/_astro/preloader-tabs.Dd3zGLli.png)

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## Tabs on this panel

| Tab | Feature | Tier | Guide |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Crawl Now** | Sitemap crawling on a schedule | Free | [How to crawl your sitemap](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/crawl-now/) |
| **Scheduled Prewarming** | Warm named URLs at chosen times | ⭐ Pro | [How to schedule cache prewarming](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/scheduled-prewarming/) |
| **Predictive Warming** | Rank and warm your hottest URLs | ⭐ Pro | [How to auto-warm your hottest pages](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/predictive-warming/) |

Each tab has its own address, so you can link straight to one:

| Tab | URL |
| --- | --- |
| Crawl Now | `#/cache/preloader` |
| Scheduled Prewarming | `#/cache/preloader/scheduled` |
| Predictive Warming | `#/cache/preloader/predictive` |

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## Which one should you use?

All three fill the cache ahead of demand; they differ in *what* they warm and *when*.

| | [Crawl Now](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/crawl-now/) | [Scheduled Prewarming](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/scheduled-prewarming/) | [Predictive Warming](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/predictive-warming/) |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **What it warms** | Everything in your sitemap | URLs you name | The highest-ranked URLs |
| **When** | On a repeating interval | At moments you choose | Continuously, on a cadence |
| **Best for** | Baseline coverage | A known traffic spike | Ongoing, self-tuning coverage |
| **Tier** | Free | ⭐ Pro | ⭐ Pro |

A reasonable progression: start with **Crawl Now** for broad coverage. Add **Scheduled Prewarming** when you have a launch or campaign with a known time. Turn on **Predictive Warming** when your site is large enough that warming everything is wasteful and you'd rather spend the effort on pages that matter.

They can all run together, though you'll want to lengthen the Crawl Now interval if predictive warming is already keeping your popular pages hot.

> 💡 **All three need [Page Cache](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/page-cache/) switched on.** Warming means "fill the cache ahead of time" — with no page cache, there is nothing to fill and none of these do anything useful.

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## Related

- [How to enable Page Cache](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/page-cache/)
- [How to read your cache diagnostics](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/cache-diagnostics/)
- [How to auto-tune your cache lifetime](https://xspeedcache.com/docs/adaptive-cache/)