Need help with Magento 2.1.3 cache issues / best practice

[BaracudaDXB]

I have a multistore website which I inherited from another development company after 6 months of work and not a complete job.

I am relatively new to Magento, so it takes me while to find solutions. One of those is websited weird behaviour and caching. I spent days trying to find a very simple language explanation of all cache types, usage, when and why to enable/disable etc.

One of the most annoying things in related to products. Prices remain unchanged, products can't go out-of-stock etc. Can anyone send an article, or explain the best practice of how to configure and use Magento cache? Should I go with built-in or Varnish? Website is on https and I read that Varnish is not supporting https. What to do with Redis and memcached, and when and how to configure it?

One thing I found as common in all the articles I've read is that everyone agrees cache configuration is very complex and requires lot of time. My goal is first to fully understand it, then everything else will be easier.

Every comment, advice, example, whatever is welcome

Cheers!

[kgerasimov]

Magento 2 Full Page Cache should handle cases when you update product price or a product goes out of stock automatically. If it does not than there is something wrong with your installation.

Do not use Varnish if you don't know how to maintain it - it might get tricky. Go to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System > Full Page Cache and set Caching Application to Built-in Cache.

Then go to System > Cache Management and enable all the cache (including FPC). There is nothing difficult here.

PS. M2.1.3 is quite old it might have bugs of its own - try to upgrade to the latest M2.1.x.

[BaracudaDXB]

Hi, @kgerasimov thanks for the reply.

I've read that indexer should be the service which covers catalogue related things, and that is recommended to use Cron jobs to schedule regular reindexing. So event with all cache types enabled, products shouldn't display old prices or not go to "out of stock". Product with special prices are the ones which are most problematic.

I see that 2.1.3 is now more than a year old and I guess upgrade is inevitable. I'm just not sure if I should go to latest M2 version or to latest 2.1.x?

Thanks again.

Cheers,
Nemanja.