“Have you cleared your cache?” – if things don’t look right and you’ve raised the issue with someone this is 9/10 the reply. What is caching? Why is this on my site? And what does it do? Well this blog should explain all.

What is caching?

One of the best explanations of caching was from a speaker at a WordPress conference. The speaker queried the audience “What’s 3,485,250 divided by 23,235?” The crowd were silent as expected. Some in the audience dove for their smartphone calculators to work this out, and eventually, someone shouted out the answer after a minute or so. The speaker then repeated the question. The second time around, the entire audience immediately called out the correct answer. This is a great metaphor for the concept of internet caching.

The initial process was done once, painstakingly slowly, but then after this first time, the same question was asked and the answer was readily available immediately. When applied to the circumstances of your website, this explains to the capacity to deliver a web page with a super-fast loading time without having to do all the time-consuming processing, every time the particular web page is asked to load.

Why will clearing my cache fix my site

The first visitor to a particular page on your website is “asking the question” and the “answer” is provided by the website. The next time this person visits the same page, and “asks the same question”, your browser can store the answer (the web page) much quicker – that’s the cache, it’s the pre-saved “answer” to your “question”.

If you have people working on your website they will change the code, update the database, install plugins etc. When this is done this is where abnormalities can happen. You will go to the site and ask the same “question” as before, and it will provide you the same “answer” – however – if the work done on your website was to change the “answer” i.e. the colours of the buttons are wrong, then even though the tech team have updated it, you will still get the old “answer”. Clear your browser cache removes this old “answer”, forcing it to ask the “question” again. A lot of developers turn their cache off for this reason, it’s why you will hear the “it works on my machine” answer a lot.

I’ve cleared my cache and it’s still broken

Cache clearing normally applies to your web browser, one quick refresh and voila! All sorted… normally. If it hasn’t worked then go through the below to help with your issue:

  1. There’s more than one cache, maybe a server cache or a cache for the theme. Clearing these can help.
  2. Sometimes there can be a delay, if you’ve cleared all caches, depending on your setup it could be your sites on a CDN (content distribution network, lots of computers working together all across the world) and it’s taking a bit of time to filter through the network.
  3. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” …If you’re on a PC you’ve heard this before! Windows and IE can sometimes have an additional caching like systems in place. A quick reboot can help. (Apple users this is still worth a go)
  4. I’ve done everything and it’s still not working… take a screen shot, note your browser down and the url. Then send an email to the developer with a detailed description of the problem.
  5. Still no luck? – send the email to us, we’d be happy to see if we can help

How do I clear my Cache?

Here are some other resources which may help you out:
How to clear your browser cache https://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/home/
How to clear your browser cache, cookies and history   https://kb.iu.edu/d/ahic
A techie explanation of caching  https://techterms.com/definition/cache