Clear Your Cache?

Periodically, we’ll get a panicked call from one of our clients (and sometimes from one of our co-workers) that a change we were supposed to make to a website didn’t happen.  Second guessing ourselves, we check on the site to find out we actually did make that change.  So what happened?  As our title suggests, someone forgot to clear their browser’s cache.

Why does this happen?  Your web browser is designed to download pages and store them locally on your computer in an area called your “cache” (pronounced like Johnny Cash, not like the French “cash-shay”).  When you visit the same page for a second time to save download time it just pulls the page from its cache instead of downloading the whole page all over again.  So you don’t always get the most recent version of the site. So how do you clear your cache?  Each browser is a little different, but wikipedia keeps a “how to” list of a lot of browser caches and there’s always your browser’s handy-dandy “help” button.