Sometimes when we update a website the client will say that they can still see the old information and we have clearly not done what was requested. The reason for this is something called caching.

Caching is the process of storing copies of files in a cache, or temporary storage location, so that they can be accessed more quickly. Web browsers cache HTML files, JavaScript, and images in order to load websites more quickly, while DNS servers cache DNS records for faster lookups and CDN servers cache content to reduce latency.

Put simply your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc) stores a recent copy of the webpage to make it faster to load. This is then served when you request the page by clicking on a link. It’s like a photocopy and doesn’t take in to account any recent changes. Simply pressing F5 to reload the page just loads this stored copy again.

To override this caching you need to force your web browser to get a fresh download of the data from the website.

This can be done by using another web browser which hasn’t visited that page or force clearing the cache as listed here : https://www.hostinger.co.uk/tutorials/clear-browser-cache

Another method of caching is server based and can often take longer to clear. We use Cloudflare as both a security and speed improvement tool. This requires clearing at the server end.

So please be patient if your website hasn’t updated immediately.