When moving or updating your website, you may need to force a hard refresh on your browser.
This tells your browser to remove any local web page copy and download the whole thing from scratch.
How you do this depends on your device and the browser you are using.
Chrome:
To hard refresh your Chrome browser, do the following:
Windows or Linux:
- Hold down the Ctrl button and press F5
- or, Hold down the Ctrl button and press the Reload button on the browser
Mac OS:
Firefox:
To hard refresh your Firefox browser, do the following:
Windows or Linux:
or
- Hold down the Ctrl and Shift buttons and press R
- or, Hold down the Ctrl button and press F5
Mac OS:
- Hold down the Command and Shift buttons and press F5
- or, Hold down the Shift button and press the Reload button on the browser
Microsoft Edge:
To hard refresh your Edge browser, do the following:
- Hold down the Ctrl button and press F5
- or, Hold down the Ctrl button and press the Reload button on the browser
Safari:
To hard refresh your Safari browser, do the following:
Mac OS:
Hold down the Option and Command buttons and press the E button.
Why Do You Need To Hard Refresh?
When you view web pages online, your browser downloads all of the contents of the web page to your computer. It then keeps a copy of those files in what is called a cache. The next time you view the webpage, your computer will use it's already downloaded version of the files to make the web page load faster. This gives you a much faster browsing experience when you are viewing multiple pages on a website or if you visit a site often.
When changes are made to a website your browser may not realise these changes have occurred and will continue to use your local (or cached) version. So you end up seeing the old content instead of the new.
When you tell your browser to do a Hard Refresh, you are telling it to ignore it's local copy and re-download the entire web page again. This will then force your browser to show you the new version instead.
