It’s time for another Jargon Buster, and this month as we missed National Pun Day, I will resist my usual attempts to shoehorn as many puns as I can into our Jargon Buster!
This month’s topic is Cache, pronounced not as the name would suggest as cashay but rather as cash, and is something we often explain to clients who are unable to see changes to their website after they have been made.
The reason for this is that your browser by default in an attempt to be helpful will store lots of backend information from the webpages you visit like the html and any CSS or JavaScript. This means when you visit this same website at a later date, instead of downloading all this data again your browser will have a record of this and use this stored information to render your webpage.
This on occasion can cause issues when a change is carried out on a website as your browser will have cached an earlier version of the site and will often display this instead of the updated version. In order to see the updates on a site we often recommend that clients perform a hard refresh on the page they are viewing. To do this in Chrome is as simple as holding down the ‘Ctrl’ key and pushing F5 or clicking the refresh button in the top bar of your browser Window. This is usually enough to give Chrome a prod to realise a change has been made and display the newest version of a page.
If you find yourself regularly having issues with cached versions of webpages it may be time to clear your cache. You can empty the cache on your browser by visiting your ‘History’ and opting to clear this making sure you have ticked the boxes for ‘cached images and files’.