Why haven’t my web changes updated?

27th February 2021

This is one of the most common questions I get asked when updating a website.

Let’s say you’re working on your website. You have a brand new image in place which should look great on the page, and made a few minor changes to update your content. But then you come to view the live site, and all you see is the same old website. Even clicking refresh doesn’t change anything. Why can’t you see your new content? Ack!

I’m going to get a bit teccie here: When you visit a web page, your browser stores the files from that web page. This includes:

• The location of the site.
• All the files used to build the pge and run any applications
• Any downloads (documents, forms, etc)

Then if you visit that page again, instead of reloading the entire page again from your server, it uses this file to load the page quickly and reduces the bandwidth and time it takes to load the page from scratch every time.

Unfortunately, if you visit a page constantly and its being updated, the browser still loads the old files. Even refreshing a good few times doesn’t seem to prompt the average web browser. A very frustrating situation when the web designer can see the changes but the customer cannot.

So we need to prompt the browser to ditch its old files and look back on the website to reflect the new changes.

• If simple F5 or browser refresh isn’t working, then try holding down the Shift key while pressing the refresh button. Try this a few times to prompt your browser into action.
• Clear your internet cache for your web browser. https://kb.intermedia.net/article/1160 gives a great step by step guide for the most common browsers used
• Close your browser and re-open it on a different page.
• Use a different web browser
• Restart your computer

I hope this helps some poor soul out there. Trust me as a web designer, more people need to be aware of this issue.