The online world can be a confusing place, particularly for those who don’t work in it every day, and that confusion leads to plenty of questions for GOOP Digital’s website development team in Geelong.
But if there’s one group of questions we get more than most, it would have to be questions about browser caching.
“I’ve made changes to my website, why can’t I see them?”
“You said you’d add that content, why haven’t you?”
“Where’s that testimonial I added to the site?”
Browser caching! It causes almost more headaches than email – but that’s a topic for another day.
So what is browser caching? Caching is what happens when you visit a page on a website. Your browser stores information about the page in a cache so that next time you visit that page your browser will already have most of the information. That way it can present the page to you in a faster time. The browser doesn’t have to download the page because it has it stored in its cache.
Problems arise when a webpage gets new content but your browser continues to rely on the version of the page stored in its cache and won’t show the changes, at least not to you. Take solace in the fact that anybody visiting your site for the first time will see the new content – it’s probably just you who has the caching problem.
So what’s the solution?
Well, try the simplest approach first. Refresh your browser by either pressing the F5 key on your keyboard or clicking on the refresh button next to the URL address field. The refresh button is usually a semi-circle with an arrow head.
If that doesn’t work – and it often won’t – then you’ll need to delve deeper into your browser settings to force it to clear its cache and download the new information from the website you’re viewing.
How do you delve deeper? To begin with, it depends on your browser and we could churn through a lot of words in this blog going through the steps involved in clearing the cache of each of the most popular browsers.
Rather than do that, we’re going to steer you to Caching Explained, a website that has the simplest explanation of browser caching we’ve come across. Caching Explained also provides links to instructions on how to clear and refresh the cache of the most popular browsers around.
Take a visit to Caching Explained and discover why your browser caches and learn how to refresh the cache when you can’t see new content on a website.
If you still have questions – and we suspect you won’t – please call the Geelong website development team at GOOP Digital and we’ll do our best to explain further.