Clearing The Browser Cache: How To Ensure You're Seeing The Most Updated Version of Your Website

April 30th 2019

At SilverServers, we understand the pain of needing a design or technical update to your website, being told it was completed by your development team, but then not being able to see the updates when you look for them. It is understandably frustrating! “Why isn’t this little button on my website updated?” or “Why does this section look so broken?”. We frequently receive these kinds of questions when we develop new websites and web software. If work has been completed but you can't see it yet, clearing the cache is usually the first step in the troubleshooting process. Since it's such a common step, we thought we would share these instructions on how to do it!

To jump ahead to the instructions, use these links:

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Why Do I Need To Clear My Cache?

When a website is live online, it can seem like changes typically happen automatically, so why is that different during the development process or when a new tool is being built for a website? When you visit a website for the first time, your browser downloads and temporarily saves many of the files it needs to display the site correctly. In return visits in the near future, instead of spending time sending requests out through the internet to get these files again, your browser loads the site from the files it downloaded on its first visit. That’s why you’ll sometimes see websites take a long time to load the first time, but then they load lightning quick in future visits.

“Browser caching”, as its called, is also why you may not see the most recent version of a website. The process described above is great for normal web browsing, but when you’re visiting a website that’s under construction it can mean that you’re not viewing the most recent versions of the website’s files. When your website is under construction, the files your browser downloaded yesterday may be out of date today – but your browser doesn’t know that, so it uses the old files. “Clearing the cache” is something that you do manually in order to either delete these downloaded (or “cached”) files or tell your browser to ignore them and download their newest versions.

Clearing the cache every time you visit your “under construction” website can improve your ability to effectively communicate with your web developer because you will both be looking at the same version of the website. It’s an easy couple of extra clicks or button presses that can save you and your web developer some time and emails.

How Do I Clear The Cache?

To get the most recent versions of your website, you can either clear the cache or tell your browser to not use the current cache. For our purposes here, the end result is the same in either case, so we’re not going to get too technical about the differences. There are two methods:

1. Navigate to your browser’s settings, find the browsing data settings, then delete cached files, images, and cookies.

2. Use a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl-F5.

For every browser, the individual keyboard shortcuts, steps, and locations in the menu can differ slightly – so we’re going to review all of them for the most popular browsers.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Clearing Your Cache

In general, there are two shortcuts your keyboard can give you in clearing your cache. They can either tell your browser to ignore cached files or take you to your downloaded data options menu. We’ll call these “Update the Cache” and “Shortcut to the Menu”. Here are the shortcuts for 5 popular browsers: