HOWTO: Handle Website Caching

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

If you find that static website files are not updating after you upload them, the problem is usually caused by your browsers cache.

Our servers ask your website visitor's browsers to save static content (html, javascript, css etc...) in their cache, this speeds up your website, saves your bandwidth and helps keep server load to a minimum.

However, if you need to force a reload of all static content, simply press CTRL + F5 in your browser and a forced cache-less reload should be carried out. In the event of this not solving the problem, you can trick your browser into the re-caching the problematic file by making it think it is accessing a non-static file, this is done by adding a random querystring argument like this:

File:

http://www.yourdomain.com/myfile.html

Reload URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/myfile.html?randomnumbers=43534543

Or for the reloading of a directory root...

Directory:

http://www.yourdomain.com/

Reload URL:

http://www.yourdomain.com/?randomnumbers=43534543

Additionally, to stop your website visitor's browsers from caching static HTM/HTML files all together - the following meta tag should be added to the HTML header:

<meta http-equiv="PRAGMA" content="NO-CACHE">