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