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    Still seeing the confirmation message after a page refresh

    Symptom: A visitor submits a form, sees the success/confirmation message, and then on refreshing the page (or returning to it later) they see the confirmation message again — as if the form was just submitted, even though it wasn’t.

    Cause: A cached version of the post-submission page is being served. Advanced Forms renders the confirmation by re-rendering the page in its “just submitted” state; if that response gets stored by a page cache, every subsequent visitor to that URL gets the same cached “you just submitted the form” HTML until the cache is purged.

    Fix: Exclude the page that contains the form from page caching. Where you configure that depends on what’s doing the caching:

    • A caching plugin (WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Super Cache, etc.) — each has a “never cache these pages / URLs” setting. Add the form’s page URL there.
    • Server-level caching (LiteSpeed, Varnish, NGINX FastCGI cache, host-managed full-page cache like Kinsta/WP Engine/SiteGround) — the plugin settings can’t always reach this layer. Ask your host’s support to exclude the page, or use whatever cache-exclusion mechanism their control panel exposes.
    • A CDN with HTML caching enabled (Cloudflare APO, Bunny, etc.) — exclude the URL from edge HTML caching too.

    If you’re not sure which layer is caching the page, the quickest test is to load the page in a private/incognito window immediately after submitting in another browser — if the confirmation shows up there too, it’s being cached somewhere along the chain.

    See also

    Section titled “See also”