Why don’t I see the changes I just made to my website?
For example, you secure a huge sponsor two weeks out from your event and the company urgently wants their logo displayed on your event website. Piece of cake, you think. It takes less than 5 minutes to sign into Ai's Admin and and add the company name and logo to your event home page. You notify your sponsor, happy you were able to accommodate their request in a timely manner, and a few minutes later you receive an email stating the logo is not displaying on the home page. Baffled, you sign into the Admin and verify the change you made was done properly. As a last resort, you open the home page on the public site, only to find the same perplexing issue.
Don’t worry. The system is not broken and you are not going crazy. Before you pick up the phone and call your project manager in distress, there is an easy step you can take to clear your web browser’s cache, which is typically the root cause of the mysterious disappearing changes on your website.
Stop, think, troubleshoot.
Before you expend anymore valuable energy on the issue, try clearing your browser’s cache. Web browser caching, also referred to as temporary internet files, is a process that runs behind the scenes on your computer to load web pages more quickly the next time you visit them. In the case above, the sponsor and the exhibits manager both accessed the online floor plan before the logo was added. Therefore, the floor plan was already cached on their computer. In other words, when they opened the floor plan to verify the sponsor company name and logo were displaying, the browser pulled all of the temporary internet files from their computer to save time, instead of loading all of the updated files directly from the website’s server. Browser caching prevented the viewers from seeing the name change. Have no fear. There is a simple solution to clear the cache, which every web user should know.
How do I clear my cache?
The steps to clear the cache are different across all Internet Browsers. Most browsers have this option under the 'Settings' feature or 'History' feature. For specific instructions on how to clear the cache in your browser, search for this question in Google and include the browser name and version you are using.
For Internet Explorer:
Go to the 'Tools' icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser select 'Safety' select 'Delete browsing history...' be sure to uncheck 'Preserve Favorites website data' and check both 'Temporary Internet Files' and 'Cookies' then click 'Delete':
For Chrome:
Go to the 'hamburger' menu in the upper right-hand corner of your browser click on 'Settings' click on 'History' click the 'Clear Browsing Data...' button and select the following options:
For Firefox:
Go to the 'hamburger' menu in the upper right-hand corner of your browser click on 'History' click 'Clear Recent History...' and select the following options:
