Hey snd26,
Usually cache is for the finished product that shouldn’t change that much, so commonly people will work within a sandbox environment whilst setting things up, testing, fixing, and then finally moving those confirmed changes to a production environment.
Depending on the type of site and the user it’s probably not always the method people choose.
Under:
Admin –> Settings –> WP Super Cache
You will find an option called “Expiry Time & Garbage Collection” where you can change the expiration time. On that same page you could also check “Don’t cache pages for known users”, this way whilst getting it right you could see changes in realtime whilst logged in.
There could be a shortcut way to clear cache, perhaps this would save you some time:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache-clear-cache-menu/screenshots/
Would anyone be able to share with me the best combination to speed up a multisite. When my multisite goes live I will go on a dedicated server, I already have htaccess tweaks such as gzip compression and expires caching.
Taking a look at the hosting environment is always worth a look in, a shared host with many sites and processes running will be slow. You mentioned going on to a dedicated server, but I wasn’t sure about connection, set up, config, etc. It sounds like you’ve not launched yet so perhaps disabling the cache whilst developing the site would be best.
Hope you find this of some help.
Have a great weekend! 🙂