Setting Up Varnish Cache for Adobe Commerce: The Complete Guide
Varnish is the single biggest performance win for any Adobe Commerce store. This guide walks you through the exact setup, VCL configuration, and cache invalidation strategy.
Praveen Chelumalla
Adobe Commerce & AI Consultant
Out of everything I've done to improve eCommerce performance over the past decade, setting up Varnish correctly delivers the most dramatic results. A properly configured Varnish setup can serve cached pages in under 5ms — compared to 800ms–2s for an uncached Adobe Commerce response.
Why Varnish Over the Built-in FPC?
Adobe Commerce ships with a built-in Full Page Cache, but it stores cache in the file system or Redis and still goes through PHP for every request. Varnish sits in front of your web server and serves responses without touching PHP at all. For high-traffic stores, this difference is the gap between scaling and crashing.
Step 1: Install Varnish
Adobe Commerce officially supports Varnish 7.x. Install it on your server and configure it to listen on port 80, with your Nginx/Apache backend on port 8080. Adobe Commerce generates a VCL file for you — go to Stores → Configuration → Advanced → System → Full Page Cache → Varnish Configuration → Export VCL for Varnish 7.
Step 2: Configure Cache Invalidation
The most common mistake I see with Varnish setups is not configuring cache invalidation properly. When a product price changes or a CMS page is updated, Varnish needs to purge those cached pages. Adobe Commerce handles this automatically via cache tags — make sure your VCL includes the PURGE ACL and that your Varnish host/port are set correctly in the admin.
Step 3: Handle ESI for Dynamic Blocks
Dynamic blocks like the cart, customer name, and recently viewed products can't be fully cached. Adobe Commerce uses Edge Side Includes (ESI) to handle this — these blocks are fetched separately and injected into the cached page. Make sure ESI is enabled in your VCL and that the Magento_PageCache module is properly configured.