Overview
A frequent question or area to blame (especially from unfamiliar developers) is server side caching when changes are made to a site but these changes don’t appear.
This means when you’ve made a change to your website which isn’t displaying, the fault is going to be elsewhere.
While Conetix highly recommends page caching (for WordPress, we recommend W3 Total Cache), we do not explicitly force this to ensure you have a choice of implementation and therefore the greatest flexibility when hosting with us.
You can use the references below in order to check and correct why changes to your site were cached.
Checks and Fixes
Check #1: Open Incognito or a different browser
One of the first checks is to simply use a different browser or an incognito window. This bypasses the cache within your browser. If the changes are displaying in the displaying in a different browser or incognito window, this comes down to proper cache busting techniques. We have an article covering this to ensure static media changes display for your website.
Check #2: Clear any caching plugins
For those using WordPress caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache and similar, you may need to manually clear the cache for these plugins. While most of the plugins will automatically flush changes for pages, they’re not able to detect when a change is made outside of WordPress or where standard WordPress hooks aren’t called. As W3 Total Cache is our preferred plugin, we have a guide on clearing cache available: Clearing W3 Total Cache’s cache.
Check #3: Clear any WordPress Theme caches
Many of the themes and page builders also have some levels of caching internally as well, which can further complicate matters. Especially when moving between hosting providers, it’s critical to clear this cache to ensure it rebuilds styles correctly if changes are made or the hosting environment has changed. Here’s a reference to the most common:
Check #4: Using a CDN
It could be that you’re using a Content Distribution Network (CDN), which adds another layer of caching again. If good development practices are followed, changes should be automatically detected and therefore properly cached with the new changes by the CDN. However, there are always corner cases where it may not work 100% of the time and you’ll need to force it to clear.
If your CDN has a plugin or integration into your website, it would be worth checking if that plugin provides the ability to clear the cache. Otherwise, you may need to log directly into your CDN provider (eg, Cloudflare) and clear the cache manually.