Community Hub Showing Stale Data After Login

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Learnings

We recently ran into an issue on a client's Nimble AMS Community Hub where logged-in members were seeing the wrong message on a page that should have been personalized to them.

Specifically, a Salesforce flow that was supposed to know who they were kept acting like they were a guest. The fix was straightforward, but the root cause was something Salesforce changed behind the scenes that you probably didn't hear about.

What Was Happening

Community Hub has pages that display different content depending on who's logged in. When a member signs in, the system retrieves their account automatically and can show them personalized information — their membership status, renewal options, event history, etc.

What we saw was that after logging in, the page was still behaving as if the member was anonymous. The personalized content wasn't loading. If the member waited about 10 minutes and refreshed, everything would suddenly appear correctly.

Not exactly a great user experience. It was actually preventing the logged-in user from becoming a member or renewing their membership!

What Changed

Salesforce uses something called a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to make your website load faster. Think of it like a set of servers around the world that store copies of your web pages so they can be delivered quickly to visitors without having to rebuild the page from scratch every time someone visits.

In the Spring '26 release, Salesforce switched CDN providers. The new provider appears to be more aggressive about caching.

For our client, it was retaining the original value of the special Community Hub variable that determines if the user is logged in or not, and kept serving that cached copy to the logged-in user for up to 10 minutes.

Who Is Affected

Here's the key finding: this only affects Community Hub sites that use the Visualforce framework. If your site runs on the Aura framework, you're not affected.

The reason is that Visualforce pages are built entirely on the server before they're sent to the browser. If the CDN caches that server-built page, it caches everything — including the part that says who's logged in (or not).

Aura sites work differently. The page loads a shell first, then pulls in personalized data separately, so the cached shell doesn't contain any user-specific information.

How to Check Your Site's Framework

To find out which framework your Community Hub is running on:

In Salesforce Setup, type All Sites in the Quick Find box

Click All Sites under Digital Experiences (not just "Sites" by itself — there are two options and they go to different places)

Find your Community Hub site in the list. Note that your organization may have renamed it, so look for the site URL you recognize as your Community Hub URL.

Check the Framework column. If it says Visualforce, your site may be affected. If it says Aura, you're in the clear.

What to Do About It

Fixing this depends on the scope of your problem. If it’s just one or two specific Community Hub pages you need to fix and they are a Visualforce page template, you could simply tell that Visualforce page not to cache.

If the problematic page doesn’t use a template, you could add one.

We haven’t tried disabling caching on the site template used by all of Community Hub, but we don’t recommend that because you’d effectively be killing caching for your whole site, which would be like a city reducing the speed limit across an entire city when only one street had a speeding problem.

A more future-facing fix would be to upgrade your Community Hub site’s framework from Visualforce to Aura.

Need Help?

If this sounds like something you've been experiencing — or you'd like us to check your site proactively — reach out. We can verify your configuration and apply the fix or upgrade your Community Hub site to the Aura framework.

Is Your Community Hub Showing Stale Data After Login? Here's Why.