I have a website that I manage that hasn’t needed any changes in years. My problem is that when I upload new changes, it is still showing the old website page. So, then I deleted the page altogether off the server. But it still shows up in every browser I have. I even loaded a new browser on my PC and it shows the deleted website page.
I have tried:
Shutting off SYNC on each device’s browsers (I have 3 PC’s and a Phone).
Clearing browsing data on all my browsers.
Clearing browsing data in the cloud that was stored before I shut down SYNC.
Deleted the web page off the server.
Nothing seems to be working. I was just trying to change a picture on a web page.
But then I ask myself, if it was this difficult for me, what about people who go to the website? Obviously, they can’t jump through hoops and wouldn’t even know that the web page is changed in the first place.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. My job depends on me being able to update the website when needed.
First of all, browse to your site and then hold the ctrl key and press F5 a few times. This should cause the page to “hard refresh”. Does that work? If not, you may have a cache happening somewhere between your users and your site. Such caches could be if your site is behind a CDN like cloudflare or if you are using Amazon cloudfront. It could also be a cache on your website hosting provider. I know that hosts like Siteground do have some server caching on their end and they allow you to clear their caches through your web host login panel.
If you want, maybe point us to your site and we can check it out.
It is hosted at GoDaddy. Do you know if there is a way to clear the cache through the cPanel? Or should I just give them a call and ask their tech team?
I have found some more settings. Turns out that Edge pulls browsing data from not only Internet Explorer (which I don’t have), but it also pulls browsing data from Chrome. So now I’m thinking that not only my PC’s are sharing data (because they are using the same user), but each browser on each PC is sharing data. The only thing that would make this even more tricky is if the hosting server is sharing data or not updating a cache on the server.
I really do appreciate your response. Seriously. It is a clients site so I didn’t want to throw it out there. But I might have to.
I didn’t know about the edge feature, that is pretty horrible. I never develop or browse with edge unless I need to test for clients. I stick strictly with Chrome and Firefox as their toolset is superior.
As for Godaddy, I did find this page which talks about caching levels at the host that perhaps might help…
But it sounds like you are experiencing cache times much longer than what they show there. To me it sounds like you have some intermediate caching happening somewhere. The F5 trick should clear your client side cache (and change browsers) and the fact that you can delete a file off the server and it still shows tells me there is something between the user and the server holding onto the page.
I am having to rethink all my PC setups. I have 3 different PC’s that are used for 3 different things. They were all syncing through Edge. Then edge was sharing data with Chrome, and Firefox on 1 PC (it can also share with IE). Going to also check to see if OneDrive is assisting in this issue even though it doesn’t seem like it should off the top of my head.
Then I went to one of my kids PC that I setup with parental controls but never use and it was syncing too. And to top it all off, all of this data was eventually ending up in the cloud where it was stored and being re-used. What a nightmare.
The only device that was working properly was my iPhone because it’s not connected to these other browsers and systems. Because the iPhone works, I think can rule out the server, but I am still going to go over and check out the cache levels for the Web Application Firewall that you found.
So now I’m about to reformat a few of the easy PC’s and start over to get all my data cleared out. Then do a deep dive into the settings of the ones I’m not going to be reformatting.
Sometimes I feel like I’m getting too old to keep up with the pace of technology. And I have always been good with web design, programming, building PC’s, and networking.
But thanks for your suggestion. I’m going to look into that. This has been a tough issue to solve though for sure.
Wanted to post the solution here in case anyone runs into this problem in the future. The hosting provider Go Daddy had a Cache filter that stored the cache in order to make the website faster for visitors.
Inside the firewall it gives you a way to disable the Cache. I disabled it while I was working on the website, then reactivated it after I was done to make sure to keep the security as strong as possible. It also gives an option to reload the cache after 2 minutes.
Thanks to everyone who helped with this topic and thanks to Site Point for providing the best discussion for web designers and programmers online. I love this website and its members!
Martyr2 deserves the credit for this one for sure! Nice job!