Things were going great. You have made changes to your site OK, maybe added a picture or two and some news. Then it happens, you look at your site and nothing has changed. Your change isn’t changed. NOTHING HAS CHANGED!
Remain calm, you are not going mad – the problem will often be your Internet Browser. If you visit a website regularly your computer will often store a saved copy of the website page for you to view. This allows your computer to view the website from a local copy, speeding up the time it takes to display in your web browser, where these are stored is called a cache.
One thing you can try is to clear this cache, and force your computer to reload your website from your webserver by following a few simple steps.
Clearing the Browser Cache
Normally, to see the changes on your page, you click the Refresh button on the browser toolbar or press the F5 key on your keyboard. In many cases, this simply reloads the page without clearing the browser’s cache. Here are some techniques to wipe clean the browser’s cache so you will see the changes when your page reloads.
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Hold down SHIFT and click on the REFRESH button in the toolbar under the menu.
For Serious Clearing: If you are having problems clearing out the cache, then force it by choosing from the menu TOOLS > INTERNET OPTIONS > TEMPORARY FILES. Click on Delete Temporary Files. You can choose the checkbox to delete all Internet files, but you might not want to as that will also clear all your passwords and cookies, but if you are having trouble viewing the changes on your page, go all the way.
Mozilla Firefox
Hold down CTRL+SHIFT+R.
If you are using Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Extension, click Miscellaneous and then Clear Cache.
For Serious Clearing: From the browser menu, Tools > Options > Privacy > Cache and select Clear.
Opera
From the browser menu, Edit > File > Preferences > History and Cache and click “Cache”.
Safari
From the browser menu, Safari > Reset Safari and click Reset to confirm OR Safari > Empty Cache.
Google Chrome
Click on the spanner icon in the top right and select ‘Options’
Next select ‘Under the hood’ and then ‘clear browsing data’
Finally, make sure ‘Empty the cache’ is ticked and select a time frame, e.g. the past day or the past week.
I still cannot see the changes to my site
Unfortunately, as well as a copy of your site that gets stored on your computer, some internet service providers (ISPs) will also keep a copy of the site on their servers. This helps then with their bandwidth and speeds up the browsing response to customers, however it also means you aren’t always seeing the web ‘live’.
After clearing your browser cache, then if you are still unable to see the changes on your website it is likely that you are viewing a page cached on your ISPs servers. Unfortunately it is not possible to clear the cache on these servers, they tend to get cleared at least every 24 hours although often sooner. You might be able to see the changes to your site by using another connection, or by leaving out the www at the beginning of your web address.
There are a number of third party proxy servers, that are available online, such as http://www.megaproxy.com, which has a free trial.
These proxy servers do not use cached pages, by using them you will be viewing your website directly from your webserver, until your ISP clears its cache and your changes are visible.