You update a page, open your site, and… it still shows the old version. Or it looks right on your computer but wrong on your phone. Nine times out of ten, that’s caching. Your site isn’t broken.
What Caching Is
To make your site fast, copies of your pages are saved and handed out to visitors instead of being rebuilt from scratch every time. Those saved copies live in a few places:
- On the server, where your site lives
- At Cloudflare, which delivers your site from locations all over the world
- In your own browser, on your computer or phone
When you make a change, those copies are normally refreshed automatically. Sometimes one of them hangs on to the old version for a while.
Quick Checks You Can Do
- Open the page in a private or incognito window. This skips most of your browser’s saved copies. If the change shows up there, it’s just your browser.
- Do a hard refresh. On a Mac: Cmd + Shift + R. On Windows: Ctrl + Shift + R or Ctrl + F5.
- Try another device or browser. Your phone on cellular data (not your Wi-Fi) is a good test.
- Turn off browser extensions like ad blockers or privacy tools for a moment, or try a browser without them. They cause more false alarms than you’d think.
- Give it a few minutes. Some caches refresh on a short timer.
Still showing the old version after all that? Ask me and I’ll clear the caches for you. It takes me a minute.
Things That Often Need A Cache Clear
- A new social sharing image (Facebook, LinkedIn and X keep their own copy of your link preview too, separate from your site)
- Menus and headers that appear on every page
- A page you unpublished or redirected that still shows up
- Logged-in content that seems to show the wrong thing
How To Report A Problem
Whether it’s caching or something else entirely, these make a problem fast to fix:
- The exact page address (copy it from the address bar)
- What you expected to see, and what you see instead
- A screenshot or a quick screen recording. A Loom video is perfect for anything that involves clicking around.
- Which device and browser (iPhone Safari, Windows Chrome…), and whether you were logged in
- When it started, if you know, and whether you changed anything just before
Post it as a to-do in Basecamp. See How to Request Work on Your Site.